Copyright by Guiniviere Marie Webb 2010

The Thesis Committee for Guiniviere Marie Webb Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis:

Origins and Philosophy of the Butler Art Gallery and Labor Museum at Chicago Hull-House

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Supervisor:

Paul E. Bolin

Melinda M. Mayer

Origins and Philosophy of the Butler Art Gallery and Labor Museum at Chicago Hull-House

by

Guiniviere Marie Webb, BS

Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin December 2010

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank a number of individuals without whom this thesis would not have been possible. Thank you to my advisor Dr. Paul Bolin who has been a great listener and storyteller, as well as a mentor in my learning more about historical practice. Thank you also to Dr. Melinda Mayer for being a reader on this thesis committee. I would also like to thank my husband Don Webb for his tremendous support and encouragement, and to Dr. Jay Ulbricht for his wonderful stories about living in Chicago. This paper could not have been written without Jane Addams and the Residents of Hull-House, including their untiring work for social justice. I also wish to thank Dr. Suzanne Seriff for her thought provoking dialogue in The Forgotten Gateway exhibit, to Dr. Ian Hodder for showing me how to make what I seek, and to the Pythagoras Society, for opening the way.

December 2010

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Abstract

Origins and Philosophy of the Butler Art Gallery and Labor Museum at Chicago Hull-House

Guiniviere Marie Webb, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2010

Supervisor: Paul E. Bolin

Jane Addams influenced the lives of many immigrant Chicagoans through offering a variety of community oriented services including art education programs at the Hull-House. This study examines the origins and philosophy of both the Butler Art Gallery and Labor Museum, and discusses each program’s role for residents, visitors, and guests of Hull-House. In addition to providing a historical basis for Jane Addams as an art educator, this study discusses the techniques for community organization that were utilized by Hull-House residents, including Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr.

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Table of Contents

Abstract...... v

List of Figures...... viii

Chapter I: Introduction to the Study...... 1 Central Research Question...... 3 Problem Statement ...... 3 Motivations for Research...... 3 Scope of Work...... 4 Hypothesis/Speculation ...... 7 Definition of Terms...... 10 Limitations of Study...... 11 Benefits to the Field of Art Education...... 11

Chapter II: Review of Pertinent Literature and Research Framework...... 13 Introduction to Historical Research...... 13 The Value of History...... 15 Can History be Objective?...... 16 Paradigm Shifts in History...... 18 Biography in Historical Research ...... 20 Primary and Secondary Source Materials Review...... 26 Special Archival Collections...... 30

Chapter III: Historical Overview of Chicago Hull-House and Jane Addams' Philosophy of Community Building...... 32 Settlement House Philosophy and Social Welfare...... 33 Labor Conditions and Immigration ...... 36 First Community Programs at Hull-House ...... 36

Chapter IV: Childhood through Early Years at Hull-House ...... 46 Childhood...... 46 Rockford Seminary...... 51 Travels ...... 53 Early Days of Hull-House...... 55 The Hull-House: A First Among Firsts...... 57 The Beginning of Art at the Hull-House ...... 58 The Butler Art Gallery...... 61

Chapter V: The Labor Museum and Its Relationship to Immigration...... 65 Immigration to the United States ...... 65 vi

Rational for the Labor Museum and its impact...... 72 Labor Museum Philosophy...... 77

Chapter VI: Using the Labor Museum Exhibit Model to Understand One Issue in Museums Today ...... 89 Two Museums, One Shared Roof ...... 89 The Forgotten Gateway Exhibit...... 93 A Modern Immigrant Experience ...... 96 Participatory Galleries vs. Participation in Museums ...... 98 Conclusion ...... 102

Appendix ...... 104 Timeline of Immigration to the United States 1815-1950...... 104

References ...... 106

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Photo taken of Jane Addams 1878, prior to her leaving for Rockford Seminary.1 Fig. 3.1 Advertisement for land in Iowa and Nebraska, not part of the original Oklahoma land race territories...... 1 Fig. 3.2 Toynbee Hall in 1902...... 1 Fig. 3.3 Child Garment Worker alongside adults...... 1 Fig. 3.4 Child in drawing class at Hull-House Art School ...... 1 Fig. 3.5 Kindergarten at Hull-House ...... 1 Fig. 4.1 Jane Addams as a child, age approximately eight years old...... 1 Fig. 4.2 Postcard created by Jane Addams as a child for her step-cousin Sarah Hofstetter ...... 1 Fig. 4.3 Phrenology is the study of the contours of the skull in the belief that it will provide spiritual insight...... 1 Fig. 4.4 View of Hull-House from Halsted Street...... 1 Fig. 4.5 Hull-House library room...... 1 Fig. 4.6 Entrance to Hull-House parlor, often used as a meeting place for art history lessons, as well as meetings of the Jane Club...... 1 Fig. 4.7 View across the street of Hull-House to surrounding neighborhood...... 1 Fig. 4.8 Hull-House art studio...... 1 Fig. 4.8 Painting by Corot, one of the artists represented in the collection of the early Butler Gallery...... 1 5.1 A woman is being inspected upon arrival at Ellis Island...... 1 Fig. 5.2 Immigrant children play in the street next to a dead horse in the 19th Ward of Chicago...... 1 Fig. 5.3 Immigration records from 1870 from New York...... 1 Fig. 5.4 A typical tenement. Note the number of individuals including children that are sharing this tiny room...... 1 Fig. 5.5 Haymarket Square, location of the labor union riots...... 1 Fig. 5.6 Child labor laws are campaigned for by Florence Kelly, an early Hull-House resident...... 1 Fig. 5.7 Children working in a textile factory...... 1 Fig. 5.8 Demonstration of spinning and weaving at the Labor Museum...... 1 Fig. 5.9 Looms and textile weaving workshop adjacent to the Labor Museum...... 1 Fig. 5.10 Hull-House Kilns stamp...... 1 Fig. 5.11 Labor Museum workshop...... 1 Fig. 6.1 Painting by Enella Benedict ...... 1

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Fig. 6.2 Main characters from the Pinky Show who ask us if Museums will love us back...... 1

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Chapter I: Introduction to the Study

Laura Jane Addams, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 and the founder of the Settlement House Movement in Chicago in 1889, is an important figure in the field of art education. Although the history of Jane Addams’ life is fairly accessible through large collections of primary and secondary resources, the majority of discussions

are in the fields of sociology, social work, and history. What is not discussed in the majority of books and articles about Addams are the techniques for community building she used in relation to art. Art and art education were central to Fig. 1.1 Photo taken of Jane Addams 1878, prior to her leaving for Rockford Addams’ early methodology for building Seminary. community awareness, as evidenced by her work at

Chicago’s Hull-House. Jane Addams deserves a prominent place in the history of art education, and aspects of her work may serve as a possible model for museum educators today and in the future. Hull-House was the first settlement house in the United States during a time when many newly arrived immigrants were in need of the type of services it offered. Settlement houses began in England and provided clothes, food, a place to live, job training, and an eclectic variety of art education to those who were in need. After viewing a settlement house in England named Toynbee Hall, Addams became inspired to create such a place when she returned to the United States. Like Toynbee Hall, Hull-House also offered a

wide variety of social programs, as well as a thoughtful art education curriculum.

1 At Hull-House, the Butler Gallery and the Labor Museum were among the most notable early additions to the art education programs offered, and both were open to anyone who wanted to visit. Hull-House’s art education programs were popular with the surrounding neighborhood, as well as with prominent women and men in the Chicago area. Jane Addams specifically chose the Hull-House in Chicago for her settlement project because she believed she could help the immigrant population that lived there gain a better way of life. At the time that Addams established Hull-House, many of the people who lived in the surrounding neighborhood were suffering from extreme poverty, lack of sanitation, and unsafe work environments. Addams believed that the first step in helping to transform the Halsted Street neighborhood where the Hull-House settlement was located was to provide opportunities to learn about art through a variety of programs, including art history classes, art making workshops, art lending, public lectures, the Butler Art Gallery, and the Labor Museum. Addams (1895) thought that these programs, coupled with a variety of social programs that addressed the daily needs of workers and their children, would help to “make the aesthetic and artistic a vital influence in the lives of its [Hull-House’s] neighbors, and a matter of permanent interest to them” (p. 615). During the same time period that Jane Addams began her social reform work, utilizing a strong emphasis on art education with the Hull-House, other important disputes about the nature and purpose of art education were occurring across the United States. Discussions concerning manual and vocational training aimed at creating better industrial workers advocated for by businessmen, versus the concept of an art education for the purpose of individual growth abounded. The 1880s through the turn of the century were a period of hotly debated principles behind the purpose and place of a proper art education (Amburgy, 1990; Bolin, personal communication, 2005).

2 CENTRAL RESEARCH QUESTION

Jane Addams influenced the lives of many immigrant Chicagoans through offering a variety of community oriented services including art education programs at the Hull-House. What were the origins and philosophy of both the Butler Art Gallery and Labor Museum, and what was each program’s role for residents, visitors, and guests of Hull-House?

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Jane Addams is a well-known historical figure whose contributions to history are plentiful, yet many of the techniques she used to help the people who lived in and around the Hull-House establish a sense of community are not well known. Of particular interest to me is how Addams, early in her work in Chicago, utilized art education as a stabilizing force in the poor Halsted street neighborhood. In order to understand the inherently organizing role of art education at early Chicago Hull-House, the origins and effects of the Butler Gallery and Labor Museum are of great importance.

MOTIVATIONS FOR RESEARCH

The study of history helps us to understand our past, see where we are currently, and may influence future directions of art education. Jane Addams’ use of art education as it applies to Chicago’s Hull-House from 1889 to 1900 provides a historical context for her perspective on the connection between art and labor. Addams believed that access to and appreciation of art is an important activity for all people regardless of their social class, immigration story, or religion. Addams also thought it was important to reconnect with the idea of labor through craft, an idea that was emphasized at Hull-House through the Labor Museum and its workshops. In addition, discussing and appreciating art was the basis for the initial Hull-House community through the Butler Gallery. Hull-House’s

3 audience was a variety of recently arrived immigrants comprising a large number of different cultures including German, Italian, French, Swiss, Syrian, and Chinese (Holbrook, 1895). In this sense, Hull-House may represent an early type of multicultural art education. This is an important issue to continue to explore, and is increasingly at the forefront of current topics and trends in art education (Adejumo, 2002; Darts, 2006; Freedman, 2000; Ulbricht, 2005). The field of art education should persist in investigating its own history, especially focusing on figures and events yet unstudied. Additionally, it seems there is more effort left to be availed in the realm of the study of women in the field of art education. As Diana Korzenkik (1990) states, It is as if women prefer to ignore, not to notice, their subordinate positions. The “great men” histories of art education are accepted, and historical eras are defined by their names: Walter Smith, Arthur Wesley Dow and Victor Lowenfield. Art education work is largely done by women. (p. 48)

SCOPE OF WORK

In planning the topic of this thesis I began to conceive of it as a museum exhibit. As a great synchronicity, I was able to work on an exhibit that explored similar ideas during much of my research phase. In the construction and planning of the exhibit I would most like to create about my topic, I have come to several conclusions concerning the best way to present the relevant information, including what types of artifacts and details might best tell this particular story. Despite the notion that a thesis is a flat document made of paper with hopefully the kind of marks that indicate understanding of a particular topic, I present instead a synthesis of what the narrative of such an exhibit might look like as an organizing structure for the thesis document, and therefore takes on story form. Considering the topic of this thesis is concerning an exhibit-based location, namely the Butler Gallery and Labor Museum, this perspective seems quite valid.

4 In addition to the presentation of several significant artifacts that help tell the story of art education at Hull-House, primary sources including journal entries, newspaper articles, press releases, and speeches help complete the picture. Finally, I have chosen a theoretical framework to present the data as I have developed it from relevant texts found in the field of art education. There are several examples of art educators who have been interested in the work of Jane Addams over the past thirty years. In my review of the relevant literature in art education concerning Jane Addams, it appears the first time that a reference to her occurs in 1976, when Sandra Packard wrote for Art Education:

We can look to Hull-House as a model for bringing culture intimately into the community life…. Jane Addams has shown us that human beings need and choose art. She has shown us that art education has a role to play because, not in spite of, the critical problems of today. (p. 12)

Packard (1976) contends that it is a useful notion to study art educators in history who have been overlooked. She writes that issues concerning “poverty, war, starvation, air and water pollution, overpopulation, government corruption, crime, and violence threaten our well-being and our very survival” (p. 9). Packard’s argument rejects that the idea that art education should not only be concerned with teaching aesthetics, and concludes that art educators need to think about their role in contributing to social and political reform. It is not surprising then, given Packard’s perspective, she would look into the historical past towards a figure that seems to embody the notion that art education should and could be politically motivated, and therefore help to create positive change in the world. Packard found Jane Addams’ ideas (2002) about art education relevant to contemporary art education especially in terms of educating youth about art in schools, not for the purpose of the “narrow business of fitting him for factory life…but in

5 order to retain that power of unfolding human life which is implicit in the play instinct”

(p. 421). Packard wants us to think about the idea that art and art education are even more important when social, environmental, and political problems abound, and illustrates that

Addams’ use of art programs at Hull-House exemplified the quest for an applicable art education.

The next significant occurrence of a discussion concerning Jane Addams occurs in 1989, when Mary Ann Stankiewicz wrote an article for Women’s Art Journal. In this article, Stankiewicz argues that Addams’ views on art education were utilized at Hull-

House primarily for the purpose of placating workers, rather than attempting to “change the conditions that oppressed them” (p. 35). Stankiewicz asserts that it was Ellen Gates

Starr, not Jane Addams, who was the motivating force behind the art education and labor reform occurring at Hull-House, and that Addams, as opposed to Starr, “never sought dramatic change” (p. 39). Stankiewicz’s main resource for this criticism of Jane Addams was the educational historian Paul Violas (1973), who stated that Addams believed “the primary purpose of art was to provide an opiate for the masses that would modify the divisiveness wrought by their protest movements” (p. 77).

Interestingly, Patricia Amburgy, the author of the final contribution in art education to the history of Jane Addams also utilized precisely the same text by Paul

Violas in her argument against Addams as significant to art education. Written one year after Stankiewicz’s article, Amburgy’s (1990) book chapter asks us to differentiate between Addams and Starr’s views on labor and art, and utilizes Violas’ concept that

Addams “saw art as a way of helping workers tolerate the conditions of industrial labor, rather than a means of changing the nature of the work itself” (p. 106).

6 From my perspective, Stankiewicz’s and Amburgy’s views do not consider the art education that occurred at the Labor Museum, which can certainly be viewed as created solely by Addams and not Starr, in the greater context of Addams’ work at Hull-House.

There are few more contemporary writings about Jane Addams within art education, so rather than address why art educators are “just now getting interested in the work of Jane Addams,” I will discuss why art educators should be interested in her.

HYPOTHESIS/SPECULATION

A study of the origin of the Butler Gallery and Labor Museum will yield important information about the attitude of people who participated in early Hull-House art education programs. Did such programs have any influence on participants’ attitudes toward labor in the surrounding Hull-House neighborhoods?

Jane Addams’ work in localized-community building through the Butler Gallery and Labor Museum will illustrate that art education has been a successful tool in facilitating significant social reform by helping to create community identity.

Very soon after the creation of several substantial Hull-House arts programs, including an art gallery, art studios, and an art lending library for neighbors and schools,

Addams began to reflect on the relationship she had begun to observe between art and labor. Many of Addams’ initial ideas about the relationship between art and labor can be found in some of the more progressive ideas at that time concerning aesthetic education and the Arts and Crafts Movement, both of which were known to Addams from her trips abroad.

7 According to Efland (1990), as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century

“the factory had supplanted the craft workshop” (p. 50). The Aesthetic movement’s prominent thinkers and writers, including John Ruskin and Walter Smith, advocated for a higher than standard quality in manufactured goods. (Stankiewicz, 1992). According to

Stankiewicz (1992), the Aesthetic Movement’s art education thought to “prepare workers to work in art industries as well as in the larger mass manufacturing.”

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, attitudes towards manufacturing and art education began to change once again. The Arts and Crafts movement taught that machines and their operators could not make anything of aesthetic or artistic merit

(Stankiewicz, 1992). The shift in attention towards the process of manufacturing and its relationship to the plight of overworked laborers caused difficult working conditions that would be easily observable by Jane Addams and her contemporaries working at Hull-

House. Once workers were thought to need little artistic skill or knowledge by factory owners and businessmen, they became merely “sweaters,” or people who worked in the manufacturing industry. The process of creating objects of beauty and function became divorced from any skill or art needed to produce them.

I speculate that Addams created the Labor Museum in 1900 in order to observe how factory workers and their children would react to the rejoining of labor with the process of craft and art. Addams (1900) wrote that the museum was to provide classes in a variety of manufacturing methods, including textiles, metal-smithing, weaving, and spinning, and would address the “need for educational methods adapted to the situation, in which the majority of working people are placed” (p. 1).

8 There are many accounts by Jane Addams concerning her observations of the effect on the Nineteenth Ward that the Hull-House art programs, including the Labor

Museum, had on the people who lived in its vicinity. I believe that over a period of fifteen years, Addams began to see that art education, more than any other program, attracted neighbors to visit Hull-House: “Social life and art have always seemed to go best together at Hull-House” (Addams, 1930, p. 419). Once there, Addams observed visitors feeling more free to receive other types of social services, including food, education, recreation, and so on, thus improving the entire living situation of the district.

Once the populace began to think of Hull-House as central to the community, it is almost certain that the people who came to the art history classes would be the same individuals who visited the labor museum, the same people whose children attended the kindergarten, and the same people who yearned for improved working conditions, who went on to create labor unions in the parlor of Hull-House (Addams, 1895, p.141). My argument is not that art education created labor reform merely through the proximity of all of these different types of programs offered on one city block, but that art education and labor reform went hand-in-hand at Hull-House.

In conclusion, I do not support the notion that Addams (1895) initially set out to link art education and labor reform through the Hull-House, but that over time, she observed that “the settlement, then, urges first, the organization of working people in order that as much leisure and orderly life as possible may be secured to them” (p.148).

As a consequence of the synthesis between art education and labor reform at Hull-House a more complete social justice would have been able to be achieved, one that addressed

9 people’s need for art as well as meaningful work in the changing world of industrialization.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

In order to bring further context to the study, there are several key terms that it will be helpful to learn in advance. Each term is significant in understanding the backdrop against which the residents of the Hull-House worked.

Jane Club

During the late1800s and into the 1900s, women who worked in the industrial marketplace were subject to a number of injustices, including lack of sufficient daycare for children, lower wages than men, and poor working conditions. While labor unions were becoming more common, they were not open to membership by women. Addams saw the necessity for women to organize their labor efforts, and created the Jane Club at the Hull-House as a social and political venue for securing rights for women to a better working and living environment. The Jane Club was originally founded by seven women who then became residents of Hull-House. The Jane Club met once a week, and went on to form the Shirtmakers Union in 1891, the Cloakmakers Union in 1892, and finally, the

Chicago Women’s Trade Union League. (Addams, 1895, p. 188).

Settlement House

Settlement houses were a form of social welfare that began in London with the creation of Toynbee Hall in 1884. Settlement houses were literally houses that existed amongst the poorest neighborhoods, where residents mostly comprised of upper-middle class individuals, but that also included women and men residents from the surrounding

10 area. Residents provided important services such as food, education, and social functions for surrounding neighborhoods in exchange for room, board, and job training. The philosophy of settlement houses was that in order to change people’s living situations, it was of paramount importance that first the environment must be changed, and that leadership training was important. Settlement houses stressed local action, political action and legislation as the key to changing neighborhoods and improving communities.

Jane Addams created the first settlement house in the United States, located in Chicago, and called it Hull-House. (Zastrow, 1992, p. 4)

LIMITATIONS OF STUDY

A study that includes Jane Addams instantly becomes an enormous topic. This thesis is limited to a very narrow section of time: from 1889 when the Hull-House first opened its doors, to 1900 when the Labor Museum exhibit began. In order to focus on the question of the influence of the Butler Gallery and Labor Museum on the Halsted Street Neighborhood, other important aspects of Chicago history will not included. One of the important aspects of this thesis is that I have chosen to emphasize primary sources that are available through the autobiographical writings of both Addams’ and her contemporaries, as well as special collections that have been preserved, rather than rely on secondary sources.

BENEFITS TO THE FIELD OF ART EDUCATION

The benefits of this study include adding to the knowledge base of the field of art education about the history of art education in community organization, and gaining knowledge about an important figure in American History. The history of building community at Hull-House presents an interesting opportunity for art educators who believe that social transformation is best situated from

11 within diverse neighborhoods. The identification of leadership qualities within cultural heroes is useful to contemporary art education. From a university-level academic perspective, art teachers-in-training could benefit from discussing more specifically what is meant by leadership, and finding role models in art educators, or even better yet, relating their personal experiences to specific qualities of interest that they both wish to embody, and to pass on to their students. As Hoffman (1980) writes, “Rarely do we teach young or prospective art educators the implications of leadership developed to further the impact of the arts on the lives of populations outside the school” (p. 22). Jane Addams’

Hull-House provides a backdrop against which many important men and women successfully studied the problem of poverty in the United States during the late 1800s. In conclusion to this introductory chapter, the historical investigation of the Butler Art Gallery and the Labor Museum at Chicago’s Hull-House helps to shed light on previous art education historians’ ideas concerning Addams’ techniques. In this study, I show Jane Addams as an influential philanthropist and social engineer who helped to vastly improve the working conditions of the Hull-House neighborhood, partially by providing opportunities for a significant art education. In the next chapter, I will discuss the theoretical framework that I utilized in my investigation of Jane Addams, including the nature of studying history, and the impact of historical discourse in an academic field.

12 Chapter II: Review of Pertinent Literature and Research Framework

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects. -Herodotus, The History of Herodotus

In this chapter, I introduce the materials of my research, including primary sources culled from Jane Addams’ diaries, Chicago newspapers and magazines, and personal correspondence, as well as secondary materials. In addition, I introduce the research framework that I utilized in my interpretation of the historical documents and objects related to the study.

INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL RESEARCH

In order to fulfill my plans of writing on the topic of Jane Addams and the Settlement House movement in Chicago in the early part of the 20th century, it is important to establish my motivations and methodologies for how I have I conducted my historical research, and to introduce my most important primary source materials. I have chosen to examine several theoretical frameworks concerning the nature of historical discourse, including the value of studying history itself, whether or not historical inquiry can be objective, the preeminence of paradigm shifts in history, the use of biography in history, and the concept of moments of deposition with regards to material culture. History is something that should be studied, and several art educators have discussed a specific manner in which historical inquiry should or could occur. Determining specific details of a historical research project can be a positive occurrence for a new scholar in the field, although it can also be somewhat frustrating. Allowing each art education historian the maximum amount of freedom and flexibility in discerning his or her own historical research method is important, because each individual project can vary widely in both scope and substance. However, by leaving the

13 method of historical inquiry completely open, doing history would be a difficult and cumbersome art to teach and also to learn. For this reason, I am most grateful for the body of research that has already been completed on the topic by other scholars in art education. For my historical research model, I propose a method of doing history in which events - people, places, objects, and subjects - become contextualized through a reading of everyday domestic objects. However, I note that it is not possible to ever write a complete history. Since history is made up of numerous viewpoints and perspectives, the only complete history would be one in which each and every voice is represented as they would represent themselves. Picking too broad a history to discuss will quickly find readers and researchers dangerously overwhelmed. What historian has not experienced the moment when a previously undiscovered detail changes the entire scope of the study being conducted? Or when in communicating that all-important detail, the faces in front of them glaze over in boredom or incomprehension? Do we really need another 2,000 page book on the history of the paper clip? History loses meaning when it becomes de-contextualized for the reader. History cannot be written purely for history’s sake, but the meaning of historical events can become living bridges between time periods. Such bridges will not have relevance if they become a thing only unto themselves, as opposed to sparking a new set of questions, and therefore, a new relationship between the past, the present, and the future. Who starts out wanting to write an uninteresting history on an unimportant topic? So often, historical writing relies on a tone that tries to convey an objectivity that is not theoretically possible unless the writer actually experienced the events described. This kind of writing is mostly uninspiring, and does not allow for the researcher or the reader to fully immerse themselves in the events and people described. Therefore, I find that it is of utmost importance that historical writing invites the readers into its special world of “that which is yet to be” by providing details that more faithfully describe the sensory

14 environment in which the history occurred, and that more fully explores the connections between the history being written, and the researcher’s personal experience of creating a representation of their experience of the past. First and foremost, we should be writing history that is important to us because we have asked ourselves the most important historical question, “[w]hat was life like for people in the past” (Spector, 1993, p. 1)?

THE VALUE OF HISTORY

We are not born naturally understanding the value of history. We may have the inherent knowledge, especially as a young child, that there exists within our lives a time we cannot recall. We learn to rely on photographs, stories from our parents and teachers, and even our own artifacts, to teach us of the time before we can remember. As we grow older, the manner history is taught tends to emphasize names, dates, places, or lessons concerning the occasional object or drawing—these are the artificial ways that we come to understand our ideas about history. As we age, our very early childhood may gradually fade into darkness, teaching us that what has happened in the past is not necessarily important, that we can reinvent ourselves infinitely easier now that our personal experiences are more illusionary and less important than we had supposed as a child. At this point that many people completely lose interest in the study of history, and the importance of it. In many ways, the study of the history of a particular academic field follows the same patterns as the human lifecycle. When an academic field emerges, it probably does not concern itself with its own history, but may recognize that there will be some areas later that it cannot or will not remember for itself. As a field of inquiry grows more mature, one of the first ways that it attempts to legitimize what it is doing to those outside the field is by showing that it has a history, and all the proper proofs thereof.

15 What are proper proofs of history? The same question could be restated as, what kinds of evidence are the most appropriate for conducting a historical study, and what is the best way to conduct historical research? In 1985 the field of Art Education in the United States collectively and visibly recognized the importance of studying history by inviting art education scholars to present on a wide variety of historical topics at a prominent conference. As a preface to the Pennsylvania State University’s proceedings, The History of Art Education (1985), Dr. Grace Hampton, the Director of the School of Visual Arts wrote:

From this instant, time runs both forward and backward. Our common sense thinking tells us that our past is known and our future unknown. In art education, however, it may be that our past is as much a series of puzzles as our future is a bundle of vague prospects….By having set our sights continually upon the future, American art educators…have quite systematically ignored our past. This conference might be a sign of change. (Hampton, preface).

It is not insignificant that the papers that were published from this first conference dealt with the nature of history as flowing through the work of historians and educators. In this sense, recognition of Addams’s work as an art educator from within the field of art education may influence or even change the manner in which we view art as a technique for building community.

CAN HISTORY BE OBJECTIVE?

The first chapter included in the 1985 history of art education publication is a writing by Karen Hamblen, entitled “Historical Research in Art Education: A Process of Selection and Interpretation.” In particular, Hamblen is concerned with questions of objectivity within history, subjectivity of the researcher, and the interpretation of historical information as factual.

16 Hamblen (1985) introduces the idea of historical research, and possible problems associated with the way in which historical data is reviewed. She presents the idea that the interpretation of history is dependant on the perspective of the historian, and what information they have chosen to include as relevant to that history. Hamblen reminds us “historical research partakes of the modern ethic whereby meaning is humanly created” (p. 1). Hamblen states that the process of doing historical research needs to include an inquiry into how meaning of a particular event is ascribed, as well as how the fact that an event is not independent from how people think of the event itself. This method of manufacturing meaning is an important concept for the researcher to examine, as well as for the people of the community whom the history claims to represent. Hamblen describes the way in which meanings of events can be manipulated, either consciously or not, by the bias present in the researcher. Hamblen says that cultural bias, temporal and physical distance from the event in question, the materials available to study, and selectivity on the part of the historian creates flaws within historical interpretation. I disagree with the idea that sheer selectivity on the part a historian necessarily causes inherent flaws within the storytelling. On the topic of selectivity and historian bias, Diana Korzenik (1990) points out “If I were a purist, I might consider these personal influences as contamination. I might want to clean them up; instead I have become fascinated by them” (p. 49). Personally reflexivity on the part of the historian is paramount; if it is truly impossible to write a purely objective history, then it seems necessary to include the process of writing history, and the experience of writing it, as among the important facts presented in written history. Korzenik (1990) divides the study of history into two categories, the first deals with things that are motivated by needs that have arisen in the field of art education, and secondly those that include questions that tend towards an autobiographical discovery or quest concerning the topic chosen. Korzenik believes that this is a valid motive for choosing a particular history, and that these studies are guided by an all-important

17 question, “Why does this question matter so much to me” (p. 49). From this perspective, research is not an ivory-towered preoccupation with history, nor is it a kind of oral tradition passed down from generation to generation, but an opportunity for art educators to equally participate in an ongoing dialogue about their questions and inspiration. Paul Bolin (1996) reminds us “our lives are directed through the questions we ask” (p. 6), and as art educators, our questions about our history will, by necessity, be personally motivated. Therefore, I do not take issue with the idea that my historical research may or may not be objective, and instead allow myself to fully explore the degree to which it is personally motivated, by my personal experiences, and for my personal reasons, while at the same time I realize that it is important to develop a historical method that carefully measures and weaves relevant threads of our field’s history. In interpreting and contributing an important facet of previously archived primary source materials to the field of art education generally, I also utilize the previous studies in art education to provide the most useful history; one that does not denounce the experience of the history writer as irrelevant, but one that advocates for a contextualized and, therefore better objectively grounded historical text. In this sense, I am far more concerned with the text of the history as I personally explore and write it, rather than a kind of omniscient history as it has been supposed to exist in limbo, in situ, awaiting discovery.

PARADIGM SHIFTS IN HISTORY

There have been several very important articles that have specifically dealt with how to engage in the historical process in art education. At the Pennsylvania State University Conference in 1985, Donald Soucy presented a paper titled “Approaches to Historical Writing in Art Education: Their Limits and Potentialities.” Soucy’s approach is initially critical of previous attempts to do history in art education. He begins by

18 stating “contemporary education historiography attempts to situate education within a sociopolitical context. But although these social or revisionist histories differ from those written in the fifties, they are still embedded in their time and place” (p.11). Here again is the critique that a full history of art education will attempt to classify the exact context in which the history was written. However, Soucy also contends that, while previous attempts at an art education history might be inadequate, it is important to recognize that they will likely also contribute to the overall issue at hand, which is to create a cohesive and worthwhile contribution to the field of art education. Soucy (1985) introduces the idea of the paradigm-centered view of art education history. In his own words “histories of one or more selected places, organizations, or theories are sometimes put forward as a history of art education in general. This form of historical writing might be labeled the paradigm approach” (p. 13). Soucy describes the paradigm-centered approach in two ways. First, he cautions historians about the concept of using the idea that “first is best” (p. 14). In other words, just because something happened in one locale first, it doesn’t mean that that this is the most important place to focus a historical study. Rather, we should look for the places of transition where we can see a shift or change in the way that people think and act about a particular subjects as ideas are changing. This is an important point, and one that is also advocated for by Arthur Efland, who reminds us not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to appreciate the ebb and flow of ideas:

The problem is that throughout the century we seem to be involved in cycles of innovation and discard with little apparent forward motion, and the reason for this is the belief that there is a true paradigm—a right or better way to teach art, and that other ways must perforce be wrong. (p. 5)

The idea that history is a series of events through which some paradigms become more popular based on their ability to address current issues is an important idea, because it can help our field understand why some histories have been written, and others have

19 not. This concept is reflected in Mary Erickson’s article “Styles of Historical Investigation” (1984). Erickson divides historical research styles into four categories that include realistic history, formal history, expressive history, and pragmatic history. With regard to Efland’s concept of paradigm shifts, Erickson states that a pragmatic history “is concerned with the issues and problems of the present” (p. 123). This kind of history could be very helpful to our field, especially as we find ourselves faced with the necessity of justifying the need for art education at all. In many senses, we are faced with a paradigm shift in society, which again questions the necessity for art education within schools; how will we continue to define and defend our field? Is the history of art education a history of teaching in schools, or something altogether more inclusive? Perhaps as society continues to push art education to the side, one way we can combat such a troubling shift is to press on with our investigations of the types of art education that are occurring and have occurred in communities throughout history, including the most basic level of community art education, the home.

BIOGRAPHY IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH

It is very probable that when thinking of a historical study, many readers recall a more traditional historical format of a biography of a particular person. In art education, we have seen such histories have a tremendous impact on our field, including biographical studies of Walter Smith, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Viktor Lowenfield. However, conducting a historical study purely through the lens of biography could present some unfortunate difficulties. Donald Soucy’s (1985) main concern with the format of biography is that it tends towards depicting the life of a single person, and such a description does not necessarily depict an actual trend, but shows that “the principle topic is the career and ideas of the interviewees themselves (p. 12).” Similarly, Soucy writes of his concern that “a

20 biographical study is limited by the concerns of the historian, the witnesses, and the other sources of evidence. In addition, the study is restricted to those facts that in some way relate to the biographee” (p. 13). I find this statement to be particularly important in my study of Jane Addams. The desire to present Jane Addams from a purely biographical perspective has a certain strong magnetic force, particularly considering her tremendous charisma and very interesting life. I appreciate Soucy’s warning about such types of history, especially considering, as Soucy says “historical prominence breeds increased historical prominence (p. 13).” However, since Jane Addams has not been recognized as an important figure in art education, and I believe that she is, for both personal and professional reasons. Including biographical information about her from the context of her own writings will be paramount to understanding her motivations for highlighting art education as a necessary practice at Hull-House. I also believe that by allowing her own words to speak for her actions, as opposed to interpreting what someone else says about her, some of Soucy’s concerns about the muddled nature of interpretation may be altogether alleviated. Graeme Chalmers (1993) also writes of some important issues to be considered when writing biography as if it were a complete history. Chalmers admonishes certain attempts at art education biographical history as being nothing more than “glowing accounts of the lives of past art educators that are nothing more than hagiographic excursions into saint-making. Such studies are not history” (p. 254). While this seems somewhat heavy handed to me, I understand the importance of what Chalmers is trying to communicate. It is all too true that many historical texts rely heavily on the biography in order to excite and capture the attention of their readers. If we truly do reject the notion of a names, dates, places art education history, then it seems almost intuitive to grasp towards the next best thing, the blockbuster personality. However, there is an inherent danger in adopting biography as methodology, since it relies heavily on creating the notion of a hero, and that that hero status is the something that we should be paying

21 attention to, rather than the context within which a particular history of a person is occurring. Historical literature refers to the contextualization of documentation and information as framing, and Chalmers (1993) believes that it “requires that we consider and explain the ‘why’ and the ‘how.’” (p. 255). However, he goes on to comment, “real history requires that we go beyond documentation and interpret facts” (p. 256). What does it mean to interpret facts, and how do we do it? What qualifies as a fact of history?

How History Occurs

It is very romantic to think of history as a series of facts or unconnected dots, and that the job as the historian is to create the relevance, as if a ship’s captain sailing without a map somehow finds the Spice Islands by stars and seamanship alone. While in one sense, the study of history could be considered as embarking upon an uncharted realm, in another very real sense the purpose of writing history is to look for the histories that were prepared for us by the people living in the past.

I have already discussed the necessity for a historian to contextualize his or her own experience, including the questions that they have asked in order to create the history they are writing about. Now I will discuss the idea that history occurs through a series of either accidental or carefully orchestrated attempts by people in the past to communicate with the future, and what we can learn about ourselves in this reflective process. In many ways, an understanding of ourselves is very important in order to understand the past, and what it has to teach us, as well as what people from the past might most want us to know about their experiences and lives.

In the field of archaeology, particularly European and Eastern European archaeology, one method that researchers use in order to understand the significance of

22 the types of datum, including objects and interpretations of those objects, is a concept called the moment of deposition. The moment of deposition is when a person or a group of people, for whatever reason, decided that it is important to them to conceal or highlight a specific event or occurrence, through the use of material culture, in the fabric of time.

One example would be the pyramids of Egypt. While the pyramids likely served a specific purpose during the lifetime of the pharaohs and workers who created them, they also figure largely in the mainstream of today and with a different meaning. This is very much like a time capsule, and the true nature of history is abundant with examples of people and groups doing very much this same thing. The occurrence of such moments has been observed to be happening from the Neolithic period to the present day:

Numerous examples could be cited, from the wholesale deposition of metalwork in hoards and water contexts in the Bronze Age, to the careful selection and burial of debris in pits, enclosure ditches and other contexts in the Neolithic…that objects were discarded in a manner we would not recognize as functional is telling of our encounter with different systems of value. (Pollard, 2001, p. 315).

The desire to preserve and to communicate with the future may be an intrinsic human desire, and it is the historian’s job to locate and interpret the past. How do we find those individuals to investigate? Do we only pick those individuals whose histories are so obvious because of the great care they have taken to preserve it?

It is very problematic to sort between those objects which seemingly were thrown away by people in history, and those who have left us extensive notes about their experiences and lives via diaries, books, articles, and that most holy of all moments of deposition, the archival box. Who gets to choose who gets an archival box? What kinds of factors determine whether or not a person is important enough to be archived through

23 history? Is our job to find those who were able, because of stature in society and success in life, to have a box we can easily peruse? Or is there another way to determine the nature of daily life, as experienced by people in history. Like Diana Korzenik (1985), I believe that history can occur anywhere, and that history can often reanimate those objects and items that we previously believed to be unimportant, and even uninteresting.

In an article entitled “The Aesthetics of Depositional Practice” (2001) Joshua

Pollard discusses such issues of intentional versus unintentional archival process.

Archaeologists are often faced with the fact that many artifacts are found by a best-guess scenario. Perhaps there was a moment when a particular tribe or group of people had to leave suddenly, without their belongings. Is it possible to examine these moments of deliberate deposition? One important key to understanding history is determining the intentionality of the history being created in the present by members of the past. What does the history have to say, and for what purpose was it created? What is the meaning, if any, for the future?

According to Pollard (2001) deposition of material culture is significant because it can help us understand the values and symbolic nature of the actual moment through which a history is occurring. Pollard writes that the moment of deposition is,

both an outcome of culturally specific schemes of symbolic order and a means by which these schemes are reproduced…social actors occasionally drew upon meanings ascribed to objects, meanings generated through contexts of production, use and association, in order to construct particular material ‘statements’ through deposition. Depositing things in the ground therefore served…as a very deliberate strategy in the negotiation of values. (p. 316)

This concept could be useful in looking at historical remnants that are available through primary source materials. In this sense, one of the major challenges for a

24 historian is to not only to interpret the materials that are supposedly representative of an entire past, but also to question how those materials came to be preserved at all, and for what purpose. I posit that an examination of the motivations of those historical figures who have intentionally become iconic, such as Jane Addams, may reveal types of information about history that may have been previously undeterminable. By examining these moments of deposition, an entirely different perspective may be gained, either by uncovering information that was not previously known, or just as importantly, by showing inconsistencies in the historical record.

Examining one description written by Jane Addams about the creation of the Labor Museum in 1900 will reveal an example of such an inconsistency discovered through investigating a variety of moments of deposition. In her article for the “First Report of the Labor Museum at Hull-House, Chicago, 1901-1902,” Jane Addams carefully tells the story of why she created the Labor Museum.

The Labor Museum was first suggested by the fact that the Italian colony immediately east of Hull-House are many women who in Italy spun and wove the entire stock of clothing for their families, some of the older women still using the primitive form of spindle and distaff. It was hoped that by the help of these women it might be possible to graphically illustrate the development of textile manufacture, to put into sequence and historic order the skill which the Italian colony contains, but which has become useless under their present conditions of life in America. Such a demonstration, it was believed, would not only prove educational, but might have an indirect social result. (p. 1)

Nowhere in this particular article does Jane Addams mention that when she visited Toynbee Hall in London during 1888, and became inspired to create the Hull-House in Chicago, the first Arts and Crafts Movement’s exhibition was taking place during the same time and in the same locale. Jane Addams would have had the opportunity to have attended this exhibition, and likely would have been invited to go by her hosts at Toynbee

25 Hall. By the similarities found in her writings concerning the Labor Museum and those by Ruskin and Morris about the Arts and Crafts Movement, it seems that Jane Addams found the ideas of her contemporaries to her liking, and thus she implemented them as the foundation to the reason for creating the Labor Museum. By paying careful attention to why Jane Addams wrote the First Report of the Labor Museum at Chicago, a moment of deposition into the banks of history can be glimpsed. Including consideration of the motivations Jane Addams may have had for communicating this particular history allows for including facts and details about her life that may have been missed otherwise.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCE MATERIALS REVIEW

Jane Addams was an extraordinarily prolific writer and speaker. There is no lack of source material about Addams, and so it was with caution that I chose specific references for this study. Addams 1910 classic, Twenty Years at Hull-House is the autobiography by Jane Addams about her historical background and reasons for creating the Hull-House settlement house in Chicago. It is one of the more important texts for my research because it is Jane Addams’ reflective thoughts about herself. Of particular interest to this study is chapter XXXVI, titled “Arts at Hull-House.” Addams reflects on the need to include art, theater, and music as a part of the settlement house philosophy, as well as the relationship between art and labor to the problems of industrial workers as experienced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries:

It has been pointed out many times that Art lives by devouring her own offspring and the world has come to justify even that sacrifice, but we are unfortified and unsolaced when we see the children of Art devoured, not by her, but by the uncouth stranger, Modern Industry, who, needlessly ruthless and brutal to her own children, is quickly fatal to the offspring of the gentler mother. (p. 337)

Where Jane Addams’ personal diaries at times seems to gloss over important details or provide too many details on topics not suitable for this thesis, the Jane Addams

26 Reader (2002) offers significantly more information about the life and times of Addams and her cohorts. This collection of important essays was collected from books and articles that are for the most part out of print. The book covers the period from Jane

Addams’ earliest writings in the 1880’s, to her final writings prior to receiving the Nobel

Prize in 1931. The works collected in the book highlight a question that is often cited about Jane Addams: was she in a naïve and idealistic fashion trying to help new immigrants settle in to their new and less than optimal lifestyle in the United States, or did Jane Addams have something far grander and groundbreaking in mind with the development of the Hull-House Settlement? In particular, the essays show Jane Addams’ views about the connection between labor, art, and the immigrant people who she claimed to represent.

Addams work for social justice did not occur in a vacuum, nor could it be said that she was the only active agent for change during her time. Several of the residents of

Hull-House are significant historical figures in their own right. In addition to Ellen Gates

Starr, Florence Kelley, and Julia Lathrop, were also prominent contributors to Hull-

House and to its mission to understand poverty. Florence Kelley was the main drive for the Maps and Papers project, including organizing the groundbreaking statistics collecting that Hull-House came to be known for. As an excerpt from the introduction to the settlement’s work in the book Hull-House Maps and Papers, Addams (1895) writes the following:

The residents of Hull-House offer these maps and papers to the public not as exhaustive treatises, but as recorded observations which may possibly be of value, because they are immediate and the result of long acquaintance. (p. 5)

27 Hull-House Maps and Papers was one of the first publications to come out of the Hull-House Settlement. The Maps and Papers book highlights the daily and familiar recorded observations of the ways the Hull-House neighborhood changed since the beginning of Hull-House in 1889. This book includes essays by several of the more famous residents, including Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelly, and Ellen Gates Starr. Essays and research presented in Hull-House Maps and Papers does not claim to be an instruction manual for creating a settlement house, but instead focuses on the actual constructive work performed by the residents of Hull-House. In addition, the essays are a significant example of scientific endeavor by female philanthropists doing professional sociology. By 1900, Hull-House had become quite notable. On any given week, it was normal for attendance to top 2000 people. Neighbors to Hull-House were encouraged to utilize the services and programs that were offered, and to tell others about their experience. As the number of Hull-House programs increased, Hull-House itself expanded into other buildings located on Halsted Street. By the time the Labor Museum was created, programs included a wide variety of arts education programs, a men’s club, dining hall, kindergartens, recreation areas, library, kitchen, housing, a large number of civic and performance groups, and even a dedicated art space, the Butler Art Gallery. From the early success of the Butler Gallery, Addams knew that people would be interested in coming to Hull-House to see this new exhibit. Addams’ 1900 article “Labor Museum at Hull-House” in Commons introduced the public to the Labor Museum for the first time. In it, Addams introduced the concept of the Labor Museum and her hopes for its affect on residents and the community surrounding Hull-House. Addams remarked on the need to have adult education programs that connect art and industry at Hull-House, as well she expressed that the process of learning should be separate from the idea of an adult school. Addams (1900) stated “The word ‘museum’ is purposely used in preference to ‘school,’ both because the latter is distasteful to grown-up people from its association

28 with childish tasks, and because the former still retains some of the fascinations of the show” (p. 1.). After the Labor Museum had been opened, an essay by Addams in 1902 Chicago magazine carefully outlined the scope and purpose of the museum at Hull-House. Since the labor museum had been in operation for two years at the point this article was written, Addams was able to describe how the museum worked, what was being shown at the museum, and how it had positively affected the neighborhood and residents of Hull- House.

In 1990, Patricia Amburgy’s article about the progressive party and changing ideas about art education in the late 1880s was printed in Framing the Past: Essays on Art Education. One of my main motivations for pursuing research about Jane Addams stemmed from reading this article. Amburgy writes that Addams’ “conception of culture for the masses extended only as far as the way industrial labor was perceived by the working classes” and that Addams was “not unusual in limiting her conception of art to an ‘idealization’ of industrial labor that would make it appear meaningful to workers” (p. 108). Amburgy does say that Addams thought that “art could provide an ‘idealization’ of industrial labor” by showing that manual labor was inherently a noble occupation, and that art could “feed the mind of the worker, to lift it above the monotony of his task” (p. 106). Amburgy suggests that Jane Addams primarily viewed the position of art education as merely an ends to a means that would make workers more comfortable with their lower position in the class system, and that Addams did not believe in the need to change the nature of the work conditions. However, there is much evidence to the contrary, that shows Jane Addams supported the working class and helped bring about a

29 considerable change in the working conditions of her time1. This observation is repeated throughout the chapters of this study. Finally, throughout the study is an assumption that the reader has at least a basic understanding of the philosophy of social work. In order to help with that assumption, I have utilized Zastrow’s textbook The Practice of Social Work (2000) on the history, practice, philosophy and methodology of social work. What is particularly striking about Zastrow’s book on social work is that he emphasizes technique and practice and how it might be utilized, alongside historical anecdote. While it is true that Jane Addams is often cited as an important figure in the history of social work, her practices are described as being different or outside of the types of social work that were most prominent in her day. Zastrow’s book helps to contextualize the field of social work, and in particular, clarify the practices of social work during the late 1800s and first part of the twentieth century.

SPECIAL ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS

While it is true that there is a large amount of written information about Jane

Addams social work practices at Hull-House, there are not as many interpreted resources concerning her use of art education as a major part of her endeavors at Hull-House. In order to bridge that gap in my historical research, I have utilized the Jane Addams

Memorial Special Collections and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, for additional primary sources, including photographs.

The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum Special Collections (JAHHMSC) includes over one hundred manuscripts, including all the yearly scrapbooks that were created by

1 Not the least of which included the formation of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Movement at Hull-House, and the formation of early labor unions, such as the Cloak Maker’s Union, as facilitated by activities of the Jane Club.

30 the women of the Hull-House to document the occurrence of meetings of the Jane Club, the formation of labor unions, and general business important to the formation and upkeep of the Hull-House’s programs, including the many art programs. The JAHHMSC is very targeted in its Jane Addams collection; only items specifically related to Hull-

House are of interest for long term archiving.

In contrast, The Jane Addams Memorial Collection at Swarthmore College is the largest collection of Jane Addams primary source materials in the world, and much more broad in its collecting strategy than the JAHHMSC collection. The Swarthmore archives contain a large variety of personal correspondence, newspaper clippings, and photographs. These items were very useful in providing content and direction for this study.

In the next chapter, I present a historical over of Chicago Hull-House, including details about how Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr came to the decision to create a settlement house. I provide more details about the settlement house movement and its effect on issues surrounding labor conditions and immigration, and how the first community programs at Hull-House impacted the Chicago.

31 Chapter III: Historical Overview of Chicago Hull-House and Jane Addams' Philosophy of Community Building

The year is 1889. The United States has become a burgeoning beacon of land and cities formed along riverbanks and railways. During this year alone, hundreds of thousands of immigrants make the difficult month-long journey across the Atlantic Ocean, in pursuit of land and a better life. At the same time, thousands of hopeful landowners rush to claim the promise of open territory2, and thousands more crowd their way onto the factory-lined streets from their tiny ramshackle tenement buildings that tower against the Chicago skyline. On one such street, located in the slums of the nineteenth ward, two young women named Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr decide to buy a small abandoned chair factory and take up residence, and the Chicago Hull- House Settlement was born. Two years

later within the same complex, the Hull- Fig. 3.1 Advertisement for land in Iowa and Nebraska. House Butler Gallery was created, and nine years after that, the Hull-House Labor Museum was open to the public for the first time. In an era when museums were considered by many people to be the privilege of only the very rich to own a collection of historical or wondrous items known as “a

2 Horseback races to claim ownership over land was not an uncommon practice during this time. During the Oklahoma Land Races over 10,000 people participated.

32 cabinet of curiosities,” the world Jane Addams inhabited at Hull-House was located in some of the worst poverty seen in early America. What may have caused this daughter of an Illinois State Senator to open both a prominent art gallery space and museum exhibit as essential components within the Hull-House settlement complex? What conclusions may we draw about the origins and immediate effect of the Labor Museum and Butler Gallery on the world, based on primary source materials including journal entries, newspaper and magazine articles, speech transcripts, photographs, and cultural artifacts? Jane Addams, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, and a primary founder of the Hull-House Settlement in Chicago in 1889, is an important figure in the field of art education. From early programs including an art lending library and art history classes, to the creation of the Butler Gallery and Labor Museum, many of Addams earliest methods for promoting community solidarity at Chicago Hull-House revolved around showcasing creative expression. Jane Addams is also an important figure in the history of social movements in the United States. Her unfaltering belief that the spirit of the worker must prevail over the challenging living and working conditions in Chicago in the late 1800s and early 1900s lead to a variety of programs addressing social and living concerns of residents and rich and poor neighbors of Hull-House. Ultimately, Addams demonstrated her belief that liberation from poverty and war lie in the pursuit of education.

SETTLEMENT HOUSE PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL WELFARE

Jane Addams utilized the Settlement House philosophy as the foundation for Hull-House, a philosophy that was developed in London at Toynbee Hall, and that suggested change in society should naturally occur from within culture at a grass roots level in its most basic form, the neighborhood. Using the Hull-House as her initial platform, Addams was able to dramatically improve the lives of many Chicagoans

33 through labor reforms including those specifically eliminating work for children, increased sanitation, improved living conditions, access to many types of education including art education, and appreciation of the fine arts and industrial Fig. 3.2 Toynbee Hall in 1902. arts. During the late 1800s in the United

States, the concept of social welfare became an important focus for cities as the mass influx of immigrants literally overflowed from overcrowded and unsanitary dwellings into the streets. Many charities and agencies were developed in order to address the staggering poverty and poor living conditions that characterized these urban areas. Initially, these agencies’ philosophies taught that the poor had created their situation through lack of moral training, and that they needed to be spiritually uplifted in order to improve their lifestyle (Zastrow, 1999). Through the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, one of the largest agencies of this time, members of the clergy visited the poorest of households door-to-door and gave instruction in spiritual and hygienic issues. At the same time, another large agency named the Charity Organization Society provided free services for the ill, the mentally and physically disabled, and orphans. Like the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, the Charity Organization Society held that the impoverished themselves were responsible for their plight, and sent upper-class society women on “friendly visits” in order to lend sympathy. Neither agency believed that it was correct to provide financial support in any way. (Zastrow, 1999). In contrast to the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism and the COS was the philosophy of Settlement Houses. Settlement Houses were first created in England in order to address issues of poverty occurring in London. Rather than visit the poor

34 neighborhoods, Settlement House residents would actually live in the most impoverished urban areas. The majority of Settlement House residents were upper class college educated women, many of whom were also daughters of ministers. Settlement House residents emphasized a holistic view of poverty. Rather than blame the poor for their situation, the Settlement House philosophy advocated for changing the social and environmental conditions in order to alleviate the symptoms of poverty. (Addams, 1910; Zastrow, 1999). Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr created the first settlement house in the

United States, Hull-House, in response to the appalling environment they witnessed in Chicago. They became inspired after they visited London’s Toynbee Hall Settlement House in England. Jane Addams had been interested in poverty since a very young age. Although she grew up in an upper-class environment, she questioned the conditions of where and how the impoverished lived after visiting a poor neighborhood with her father. In her autobiography, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Addams recalls one of her first experiences of seeing poverty: “On that day I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the country and that which even a small city Fig. 3.3 Child Garment Worker alongside adults. presents in its shabbiest streets” (p. 4).

35 LABOR CONDITIONS AND IMMIGRATION

During the second half of the 1800s, the conditions of labor were a staggering problem for many immigrant laborers, including women and children. It was not uncommon for a person, regardless of age or gender, to work multiple jobs, or a single job for 10-15 hours a day, six days a week. Additionally, housing was scarce, and families were often forced to share cramped tenements bordering their factory jobs (Boris, 1989). The term tenement, the over crowded, run-down and poorly-maintained apartments of the poorer sections of cities, came from the archaic phrase for feudal holdings. It might bring a smile when we speak of “robber barons,” but the flipside of feudalism was also part of America’s Gilded Age. Many of the older and more prosperous inhabitants in other parts of town began to leave Chicago and the surrounding areas in an attempt to find their fortune in the west (Stankiewicz, 1992). This expansionism westward negatively impacted factories; the demand for goods began to increase at the same time factories lost their previously captive labor market. Thus, factories looked to industrialization and mechanization in order to meet the demand for products. As a result of industrialization, those immigrants who were newly arrived to Chicago were forced to endure difficult living and working situations.

FIRST COMMUNITY PROGRAMS AT HULL-HOUSE

Jane Addams first steps to transform the Halsted Street settlement complex included providing opportunities for anyone who was interested to learn about art through a variety of programs. These programs

Fig. 3.4 Child in drawing class at Hull-House included art history classes, art making Art School

36 workshops, art lending, public lectures, an art gallery, and a museum dedicated to art and labor. Addams (1895) thought that these programs, coupled with a variety of social programs that addressed the daily needs of factory workers and their children, would help to “make the aesthetic and artistic a vital influence in the lives of its [Hull-House’s] neighbors, and a matter of permanent interest to them” (p. 615). Since Hull-House was located in the midst of factories and their associated tenements, Addams believed that the purpose of having art education at Hull-House was to address the situation that the daily life of the industrial immigrant worker left no room for enjoyment of those things that reflected “the highest human thought and perception” (p. 615). In other words, Addams saw that art and art education was one aspect needed by the neighborhood, but that other issues would need to be addressed in conjunction, especially the current conditions of labor. When Jane Addams opened Hull-House in 1889, she chose the location based on the idea that a settlement should be located in the precise location where living and working conditions were the worst. Addams (1910) wrote, “I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many Fig. 3.5 Kindergarten at Hull-House primitive and actual needs are found” (p. 55). Addams believed that by locating Hull-House in Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward, she would live within and perceive the problems that most affected her immigrant neighbors, including the fact that “hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street sewer” and where “an unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark, no stable

37 loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement room too small” (1910, p. 65). When Hull-House first opened its doors, in addition to an art education focus, the first residents set about creating a variety of social programs for the neighborhood. Many of these first programs addressed the physical needs of the surrounding populace, including the creation of a kindergarten, a young children’s nursery for working mothers, classes in sanitation and food preparation, the creation of an public outdoor playground, medical care, and a dining hall and kitchen that provided food. All these programs were intended to help the surrounding neighborhoods build a sense of community.

The concept of community is not new. Evidence of groups of people residing together in organized structures can be found as early as nearly ten thousand years ago during the Neolithic period, 7500 B.C. Çatal Hüyük, the world’s first city3, shows us that while human beings had been around for some time before building the first city, the concept of banding together for the purpose creating order and structure are ideas that have persisted since that time. Deciding what a community itself is, becomes an important first step in identifying what community art education and neighborhood centers should be doing. Is a community simply where people live? Is it a kind of unspoken sense that people have between each other (Arnold, 1994)? Are communities segments of society that should be defined by their shared gender, race, ethnicities, and religious beliefs (Hicks, 1994)? Addams and Starr found that the variety of human experience, both personally and internally as well as in relation to other human beings was too wide a spectrum of experiences to define with a “one size fits all” term. It is, therefore, not surprising that Hull-House does not provide a single unified definition to answer the question of what a community is in terms of art education. However, the practice of Hull-House philosophy

3 Located in Turkey, Çatal Hüyük was first discovered in 1958 by James Mellarrt. With a proposed population of between 5,000 to 10,000 people, researchers including lead project archaeologist Ian Hodder (2006) have long claimed this Neolithic settlement as one of the oldest known cities in the world.

38 is clear in regards to its audience; residents worked tirelessly to understand and provide for the needs of the local populations, regardless of race or class. In reference to Addams’ work with communities in Chicago, Hull-House adopted a definition of community along a rather simplistic line. The community that Hull-House served was anyone who lived in the surrounding neighborhoods, within the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago. The makeup of the community consisted mainly of factory workers who had recently immigrated to Chicago from a distant country. Local ethnicities included those of an Italian, Irish, German, French, Greek, Swiss, Syrian, Chinese,

Arabian, and Turkish descent (Holbrook, 1895). Additionally, the residents of Hull- House themselves consisted primarily of white, upper class, college educated women in their mid-twenties to thirties. Hull-House residents, and in particular, Julia Lathrop, Jane Addams, and Ellen Gates Starr, found it necessary to consider the variety of ethnic experience in terms of providing food, clothing, and shelter. They also found it an important consideration in terms of art and labor. Starr (1895) stated her desire to consider that a democratic view of art was a primary motivator of people when she wrote, “Let us consider what is the prospect for an ‘art of the people’ in our great cities. And first let us admit that art must be of the people if it is to be at all” (p. 131). Both Addams and Starr saw the need to identify the essential aspects of the community that they served through Hull-House, including basic characteristics such as gender and age. They struggled initially with ascertaining if there was any common need between so many different types of people. In one case, during the first meetings of the newly formed cloak makers union, Russian-Jewish tailors, mostly males in their forties who could speak little English, and their counterparts, the young Irish cloak makers, clashed horribly. Addams (1895) wrote, “They were separated by strong racial differences, by language, by nationality, by religion, by mode of life, by every possible social distinction” (p. 142). Because of the wide differences between the visitors to Hull-

39 House, residents began to consider that the Hull-House neighborhood was united as a community in that everyone either suffered under the sweatshop system of labor, or was actively involved with abolishing it, and most people enjoyed looking at and creating artwork through skills not respected or valued in the sweatshop. Therefore, the Hull- House visitors created a community from economic interdependence, a fact of which was reflected in some of the art programs at Hull-House, such as the Labor Museum. This observation of Hull-House community characteristics is akin to Hicks’ observation (1994) that, “We may wish to emphasize the commonalities that unite members of

American society as the product of many different communities…. Central to the identification of a community is the shared consciousness of membership that unites its members” (p. 150). The history of the trials and travails of building community at Hull-House presents an interesting opportunity for art educators who believe that social transformation is best situated when it first occurs at a neighborhood level. In particular, ethical considerations concerning the variety of cultural experience is paramount to a discussion concerning community transformation. Can a museum or gallery space be a community center? What would that role look like? Is it possible to belong to only one community, or do we all belong to several communities at the same time (Hicks,1994)? From my perspective, the concept of community level social transformation should be informed, as it was at Hull-House, by the needs of those members of a community. Additionally, the members of the community are ideally first empowered to decide what their needs are. Finally, social transformation does not happen in a vacuum, or through some well-meaning authority acting from above, but is at its best is a grass- roots phenomenon. As art educators, our ethical responsibility may include the consideration of the wide range of possibilities within art education to address the social, economic, political, and spiritual experiences of the members of the community within which we reside and/or work. In addition, a social reform philosophy of art education

40 helps us to inform ourselves about the population we are engaging with, and to participate in the issues of importance that arise in that community. According to Hull- House philosophy, our job is not to define the boundaries of a particular community, but to facilitate the process of communities finding their own voice and sense of stewardship (Marche, 1998), and to give power to the notion that art can bridge the widening gap between individuals and communities. As Ellen Gates Starr stated (1895):

By holding art and all good fruit of life to be the right of all; by urging all, because of their common need, to demand time and means for supplying it; by reasonableness in the doing, with others, of useful work…and the enjoyment of others, or rightful and shareable pleasure, a settlement should make toward a social state which shall finally supplant this incredible and impious warfare….And let us think on our brothers, that they may live it too; for without them we cannot live it if we would; and when we and they shall have this joy of life, then we shall speak from within it. (p. 137)

One of the most important qualities that Jane Addams possessed was her rare ability to attract wide varieties of people to come and work together towards a common goal.

Some of the most vital figures in American history including Ellen Gates Starr, Enella

Benedict, and Florence Kelly, found their contributions to society as initially resulting from time spent working at Hull-House. According to Sklar (1985):

In the 1890s the social settlement movement supplied a perfect structure for women seeking secular means of influencing society because it collectivized their talents, it placed and protected them among the working-class immigrants whose lives demanded amelioration, and it provided them with access to the male political arena while preserving their independence from male-dominated institutions. (p. 664)

Jane Addams was an organizer of human potential. Hull-House philosophy reflected Addams’ belief in collectively pulling together large groups of diverse individuals towards the goal of social justice. The art education that was performed at

41 Hull-House did not originate from one or two people, but was part of a greater network of individuals, working together. Some residents oversaw the kindergarten, some concentrated on food and medicine, others taught art history and studio art classes, or managed the Labor Museum. It would not be correct to divorce any of these opportunities for visitors from the entire experience that Hull-House offered. The full spectrum of Hull-House operations demonstrates dramatically that Hull-House’s mission was in fact social justice through art education, especially as it applied to immigrant women and their families.

From an early age, Addams was a prolific speaker and writer. One of the qualities that Addams possessed was her ability to inspire others through her speeches, through debate, and through her writings, which included substantial letter writing and published essays. While she was still in college at Rockford Seminary in 1878, Addams practiced debate, and served on the Seminary’s debate team. Her oratory skills became very important to the early years of Hull-House, as she gathered together Chicago’s wealthy elite and scholarly community, including John Dewey, and convinced them of the worthiness of the cause of Hull-House. In later years, her speech-making and writing skills became even more profoundly important as Addams fought for the rights of immigrant children on Chicago’s Board of Education. Soon after founding the Chicago

School of Civics and Philanthropy in 1913, Addams began to fight in earnest against the

United States entering into WWI, representing the Women’s International League for

Peace and Freedom as its president for the next fourteen years. In 1931, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Addams’ tireless pursuit of social justice through education is a quality to be admired by any reader of history (Elshtain, 2002).

42 The identification of leadership qualities within culture heroes, including Jane

Addams, is useful to contemporary art education. From a university-level academic perspective, art teachers-in-training could benefit from discussing more specifically what is meant by leadership, and finding role models in art educators, or even better yet, relating their personal experiences to specific qualities of interest that they both wish to embody, and to pass on to their students. As Hoffman (1980) writes, “Rarely do we teach young or prospective art educators the implications of leadership developed to further the impact of the arts on the lives of populations outside the school” (p. 22).

In teaching about leadership, it is important to note that leadership is not one single quality, or one style, in fact, there are many different qualities that a leader could be said to possess (e.g. having ingenuity, consensus building abilities, speaking and writing skills, organization, motivational skills, and so on). There are also different styles of leadership. Some leaders are autocratic, preferring to tell people what to do. Some leaders are participative, meaning that they see their role as a leader as not separate from those they lead, but directly connected to, and will often be found “in the trenches.”

Other leaders are considered free reign leaders; they do not tell people what to do, but instead value the process of delegation, and think that people should make their own informed decisions. (Zastrow, 1999). However, free reign leaders are still responsible for the outcome of those choices that others make. Identifying the type of leader that a specific person is will often result in the understanding that the most successful leaders most often make use of a combination of skills, traits, and styles. I believe that Addams shows all these characteristics, it is especially clear that she valued the leadership style of

43 free reign, enabling the other visionary women of Hull-House, like Ellen Gates Starr, to innovate on their own.

Education in a democracy means more than the pouring forth of facts into sponge- like minds: it means inspiring leadership. The leadership needs must be of two kinds: an internal sovereignty that allows for individuals to think on their own and not have the illusion of thinking by merely processing the symbol systems presented to them, and an external ability to create non-coercive consensus. Addams both modeled and directly taught these qualities. In an age where the predominate way of thought was for women to stay at home and immigrants to be glad for their pitiful jobs, she became an example of self-liberation and an instigator of communal action toward labor improvement through art education.

Leadership and education go hand-in-hand. Both leaders and successful educators must have an unshakeable sense of purpose and situational mastery. Like the artist leaders need vision that goes beyond the work at hand, and they have to adapt their methods to whatever the day brings. Addams faced a rapidly changing world with strength of purpose; this is the same alchemical formula that wakes a teacher up for her classroom everyday or paints the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, and is worthy of being taught in the art classroom, the museum, and the community center.

Concluding this chapter, Addams (2002) believed in the value of imparting qualities of leadership, especially in the context of teachers. She wrote:

As democracy modifies our conception of life, it constantly raises the value and function of each member of the community….We are gradually requiring of the educator that he shall free the powers of each man and connect him with the rest of life. We ask this not merely because it is man’s right to be thus connected, but because we have become convinced that the social order cannot afford to get along with his special contributions. (p. 80)

44 In the next chapter, I will tell the story of Jane Addams’ childhood and young adulthood, including her education at Rockford Seminary, her international travels, and describe the first art programs at Hull-House in more in detail, including the origins of the Butler Gallery.

45 Chapter IV: Childhood through Early Years at Hull-House

CHILDHOOD

Laura Jane Addams, or “Jennie” as she was known in childhood, was born in Cedarville, Illinois, to Sarah and John Addams. The youngest of eight children, Addams was left motherless when the internal bleeding from a fall during pregnancy led to the death of Sarah when Jane was two years old.

This was not the only death to befall the young Addams family; by the time Jane was eight years

Fig. 4.1 Jane Addams as a old, four of her siblings had died. child, age approximately eight years old. Addams may have escaped early childhood with her life, but she did not emerge with perfect health. At age four, she contracted Pott’s disease, a kind of tuberculosis that attacked her spine and left her somewhat impaired. Addams (1910) recalls thinking of herself as a terribly disfigured and ugly child:

My great veneration and pride in my father manifested itself in curious ways. My father taught the large Bible class in the left hand of the church next to the pulpit, and to my eyes at least, was a most imposing figure in his Sunday frock coat, his fine head rising high above all the others. I imagined that the strangers were filled with admiration for this dignified person, and I prayed with all my heart that the ugly, pigeon-toed little girl, whose crooked back obliged her to walk with her head held very much to one side, would never be pointed out to these visitors as the daughter of this fine Man. (pp. 4-5)

Perhaps it was Addams’ childhood preoccupation with ugliness and the death of her mother that caused her to soon take an interest in bones and skeletons, it is even

46 reminiscent of the cartoon work of her famous cousin twice removed, Charles Addams.4 Like most of Addams’ early childhood projects, this too was undertaken with gusto and with complete attention to detail. Jane studied anatomy for entertainment, and even included a skeleton motif in her artwork. Her step-cousin Sarah Hofstetter recalled Jane’s childhood interest in studying bones:

Jane had a passion for collecting bones of all sorts. Her dresser was a work of art with yards and yards of the vertebrae of snakes strung and festooned about! A little more uncanny were the bones of a human arm in the bottom dresser drawer.... The writer today has a card of black pasteboard with figure of skull and cross bones cut carefully out of white paper and pasted on the black back-ground signed on the opposite side in purple ink Jane Addams 1875.

Addams was especially dedicated to her father, and refers to him in loving terms. At the time of her birth, John Huy Addams was a businessman, president of a bank, and director of two railroads. He remarried soon after the death of Sarah Addams, when Jane was eight years old. John Addams was also a founding member of the Republican party, and was a friend of Abraham Lincoln during Lincoln’s campaign for Illinois Governor, and later, during his campaign and presidency. He kept a letter from Lincoln in his desk that Jane recounts with delight, and he was devastated when Lincoln died. Addams (1910) wrote about an early memory at age four, coming into the yard of her house to find her father standing there, under two white gateposts that had been wrapped in American flags, now woven with black. Addams had never seen her father cry before, and had become quite concerned. When she asked her father was wrong, he said, “the greatest man in the world had died” (p. 15). After that day, Addams (1910) remembered with great fondness requesting to see her father’s letters from “Mr. Lincoln”, which he kept in his top drawer:

4 Charles Addams is a revered New Yorker cartoonist whose drawings include popular depictions of America’s most gothic family, the Addams Family.

47 My father always spoke of the martyred President as Mr. Lincoln, and I never heard the great name without a thrill. I remember the day…when at my request my father took out of his desk a thick packet which bore unmistakable traces of that remarkable personality…As my father folded up the bits of paper I fairly held my breath in my desire that he should go on with the reminiscence of this wonderful man. There were always at least two pictures of Lincoln that hung in our old-fashioned parlor…For one or all of these reasons I always tend to associate Lincoln with the tenderest thoughts of my father. (p. 21)

Jane attended school alongside the children of mill workers, farmers, and merchants in the local Cedarville village that her father had helped build. Although she was originally being raised in what her father termed a proper Quaker environment, John

Addams considered himself to be a friend to a variety of Christian denominations in his small town. After first using his mill to help build prosperity in the village, John Addams immediately set about helping to build a library, as well as a school and four different churches, all of which he attended with his wife and family. Perhaps some of Jane’s early ideas about creating the art lending library at Hull-House partially stemmed from the knowledge of her father’s early book lending library that operated out of the Addams’s large homestead:

A large kitchen with a fireplace and dutch oven and a dining room formal parlor, and Jane Addams’s parents’ bedroom were all on the first floor. On the second was the less formal family parlor, where the Union Library of Cedar Creek Mills was shelved… (Selected Papers p. 20).

While her sisters attended Rockford Seminary, Jane walked to a two-room school in her small borough. It is during this time that one of the most famous, and in many ways prophetic statements was uttered by Jane to her father, one day while walking with him near one of their businesses, the Haldeman Stone Steam Flour Mill. According to Addams, the mill was located near the poorest section of town. And while in the past she had remembered the city as being a place of candy shops and toy stores, now her view

48 had changed as she viewed the site of the run down housing occupied by the people who would have worked in her father’s mill:

On that day I had my first sight of the poverty which implies squalor, and felt the curious distinction between the ruddy poverty of the country and that which even a small city presents in its shabbiest streets. I remember launching at my father the pertinent inquiry why people lived in such horrid little houses so close together, and that after receiving his explanation I declared with much firmness when I grew up I should, of course, have a large house, but it would not be built among the other houses, but right in the midst of horrid little houses like these. (20 years p. 3)

One can only imagine this same conversation years later when Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr chose the Halsted Street location of Hull-House. Addams would have likely recalled this early discussion with her father, and her childhood perspective on what it would take in order to lift the plight of the factory workers from their day-to-day difficulties. In this light, Halsted Street would later have seemed like the perfect place for Jane to begin the Settlement House movement in Chicago. In 1868, Addams’ father

remarried. His new wife, Anna Hofstetter, was a widow of a well-to- do flourmill owner with two sons from her first marriage. Anna had much in common with the Addams family. Her descendants were from Pennsylvania, she had lost her mother Fig. 4.2 Postcard created by Jane Addams as a child for her step-cousin Sarah Hofstetter when she was quite young, and she

49 was also raised by her older sister, as Jane had been. And whereas Jane had been the center of the Addams home under the care of her older sibling Mary, Anna made significant changes to the manner that the Addams family functioned, beginning with freeing Mary from the task of caring for her. And while Mary still remained under the same roof as Jane, she was considered finally free to consider pursue courtship and marriage, a daunting task and one particularly unfamiliar to the Addams family as Mary’s age fast approached her nearly un-marriageable twenties. Without question, the new Mrs.

Addams brought a different spiritual perspective to the household. Whereas Jane’s early religious education had been formulated by her father’s Quaker mother, her stepmother Anna was interested in the theosophical system of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose philosophy would go on to become the foundation of the New Jerusalem Church. Swedenborgianism (1990) Fig. 4.3 Phrenology is the study of the taught its followers that “mesmerism, contours of the skull in the belief that it will provide spiritual insight. spiritualism, and homeopathy” were tools that could be used to help “bind members of established Christian Churches into one religious alliance” (p. 35). Sara Addams also believed herself to be skilled in phrenology, “an analytical method of describing mental ability and human character and actions based on the size and contours of the skull” (p. 35). Phrenology was a popular practice and spiritual theory at this time, and one that would have been known to Jane Addams prior to Sara joining the Addams family.

Exposure to a variety of religious experience, especially as a young child, likely paved the way for Addams to continue to experiment with of spiritual expression. In

50 addition, the fact of Addams’ unconventional thoughts about religion later likely paved the way for her strange Walpurgis Night program in 18805 at Rockford Seminary, followed later in her life by rumors of strange occult happenings involving a so-called devil baby at Hull-House. Over time, Hull-House had become known as quite haunted, with ghostly apparitions even being reported by residents, even during the time of Jane Addams’ settlement project. According to Addams (1930), the arrival of the Devil Baby at Hull-House came as a complete surprise to Hull-House residents. After returning from a vacation in Egypt and Syria with friend and fellow suffragette Mary Rozet, Addams was overwhelmed by numerous attempts by neighborhood women to see the “Devil Baby6,” as she recounted in the book The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House:

The knowledge of his existence burst upon the residents of Hull-House one day when three Italian women, with an excited rush through the door, demanded that the Devil Baby be shown to them. No amount of denial convinced them that he was not there, for they knew exactly what he was like with his cloven hoofs, his pointed ears and diminutive tail; the Devil Baby had, moreover, been able to speak as soon as he was born and was most shockingly profane. (p. 50)

ROCKFORD SEMINARY

By the time Jane Addams was seventeen years old, she was ready to attend Rockford Seminary, just as her sisters had. Although Addams had hoped to attend Smith College or Vassar, her father, who was also on the board of Trustees for Rockford, insisted that she attend the seminary. Often referred to as the “Mount Holyoke of the West,” Rockford’s main philosophy was reflected through rigorous moral and scientific training for young women. Many of the young women who came to attend Rockford

5 Beginning with the lines “Tonight is Walpugis Night; we all realize it, the air is densely peopled with witches, goblins, spirits, & demons,” Addams’ fantastical description of a pagan holiday is quite unlike her public prose. 6 Rumors of the Hull-House Devil Baby became so well-known that it is purported by numerous sources that author Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) was inspired by this haunting Chicago tale.

51 were the daughters of wealthy businessmen, landowners, successful merchants, and those whose fathers wished for their daughters an education in the gentler arts, including philanthropy, which a private school could afford. While Rockford had proved fruitful for all of Jane’s now married sisters, Addams threw herself diligently into her studies, including Latin, debate, mathematics, science, literature, music, and philosophy, despite her lamentation that her grades and evaluations from Rockford were not viewed as transferable to other more prestigious schools. From her earliest time at Rockford, Addams proved to be an excellent student, and quite interested in learning more about the global political sphere that she had observed her father’s dedication to. During her time at Rockford, Addams (1910) began to find herself more strongly questioning the school’s moral temperature, including some of the sentiments that were emblazoned on the walls themselves: “There is the same difference between the learned and the unlearned as there is between the living and the dead,” and “Tis not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs” (p. 28). Addams (1900) recounts with a wry tone both the fact that several of the women she attended school with felt similarly, including a companion who would become her life- long friend, Ellen Gates Starr. In protest to the school’s moralizing, and upon reading De Quincy’s Dreams, each of them ingested large quantities of opium over a school holiday break, and were sent to bed by a school official when discovered.

At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincy’s marvelous “Dreams” more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium. We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and the suspense and excitement did not permit us to grow sleepy. About four-o-clock on the weird afternoon, the young teacher whom we had been obliged to take into our confidence, grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincy and all the remaining powders…and sent us to our separate rooms (p. 46).

The women who Jane met during her college years went on to become her fast friends, many of whom she reports as going on to do great works of philanthropy and

52 missionary work, both at Hull-House, and around the world. Best friends Eva Campbell Goodrich, Katie Hitchcock, Mattie Thomas Greene, and Ellen Gates Star would prove to be instrumental in the formation of Addams' articulation of her philosophy of social justice. As a cradle of experimentation for the work that Jane Addams was to do later in her life, Rockford Seminary helped to prepare her in a classical fashion through the scholarly debate and writing she became famous for. In 1881, eight years before Hull- House was opened, Addams graduated and left the seminary, to pursue her boarding school ideal of practicing medicine among the poor.

Shortly after Addams left Rockford Seminary, she enrolled at the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia. However, she was revisited by complications from her childhood spinal illness, and returned to Illinois to live with her sister for the next six months while she recovered from spinal surgery. Although she was not able to attend her medical classes during this time, Addams does not report being disappointed, but instead stated she was “very glad to have a physician’s sanction to give up clinics and dissecting rooms and to follow his prescription of spending the next two years in Europe” (p. 42). It is at this point that Addams dismissed her previous inclination to practice medicine, and instead set out for a lengthy journey across Europe.

TRAVELS

Once she was deemed sufficiently recovered from her malady to travel, the first place Jane Addams went to in 1883 was London. Her comments on the site that she first saw upon exploring the city are strikingly similar to her early observation to her father about the workers’ village in her hometown of Cedarville, although from an adult perspective. Again the theme of the plight of the poor is prevalent in Addams thoughts (1910):

53 One of the most poignant of these experiences…I received an ineradicable impression of the wretchedness of East London…. They were huddled into ill fitting, cast off clothing, the ragged finery which one sees only in East London. Their pale faces were dominated by the most unlovely of human expressions, the cunning and shrewdness of the bargain hunter who starves if he cannot make a successful trade. The final impression was not of ragged, tawdry clothing nor of pinched and sallow faces, but of myriads of hands, empty…and clutching for food which was already unfit to eat. (p. 45)

Addams (1910) ends this recounting of a group of people fighting over moldy vegetables as part of a tour of London provided to her by a city missionary with a nervous comment, “For the following weeks I went about London almost furtively, afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose again this hideous human need and suffering” (p. 44). Over the next four years, Addams (1910) traveled throughout Europe, in between visiting family in Baltimore and Illinois. She visited Dresden, Paris, Saxe-Coburg, Italy, the Riveria where she recovered from illness once again, and finally, Madrid, where she spoke of her plans about Hull-House in concrete terms to Ellen Gates Starr for the first time in 1888:

It is hard to tell just when the very simple plan, which afterward developed into the Settlement, began to form itself in my mind. It may have been even before I went to Europe for the second time, but I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over too exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and learn of life from life itself; where they might try out some of the things they had been taught and put truth to the ultimate test. (p. 55)

Although Addams recounts the experience of telling her friend Ellen about her plans, she also vividly remembers that it happened against the backdrop of a bullfight in which the bull was killed. She became quite angry at the death of the bull that seemed unjust to her, and vowed at the end of the fight that she would fulfill her plans she laid out to Ellen that day. At the end of the trip both friends said farewell in Paris, Starr

54 returned to Italy, and Addams returned to London to visit Toynbee Hall. It was at Toynbee Hall in London that Jane discovered the settlement house philosophy that would become Chicago’s Hull-House. Once in London, over a short period of time, Addams had befriended the Rev. Samuel A. Barnett of Toynbee Hall, and had won the attentions of several important figures, including the vicar of Whitechapel. After returning to America, Addams remained close to her overseas acquaintances including Barnett, and would report back how Hull-House was faring. Barnett even traveled to Chicago in 1891 to speak at the opening of the Butler Gallery. While he visited Hull-House, he also helped to explain the settlement philosophy connection between Toynbee Hall and Hull-House, and describe to the audience the nature of his early meetings with Addams.

EARLY DAYS OF HULL-HOUSE

Utilizing newspaper staff, city agencies and the knowledge base of missionaries working in Chicago, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr endeavored to locate the most impoverished and needy neighborhood area in Chicago. The two women finally decided upon a large older mansion, located on the corner of Halsted and Polk Street.

Named Hull-House after Fig. 4.4 View of Hull-House from Halsted Street. its original tenet, Charles Hull, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr (1910) promptly rented it and moved in, and began furnishing it “as we would have furnished it were it in another part of the city, with

55 the photographs and other impedimenta we had collected in Europe, and with a few bits of family mahogany…” (p. 8). Hull-House officially opened to the public in 1889 with a charter that read “to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises, and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago” (Bettis, n.d., Hull-House Charter section, p. 1).

56

THE HULL-HOUSE: A FIRST AMONG FIRSTS

The Hull-House was the first Settlement House in the United States. Once the Hull-House had been established, Jane Addams set about to create a variety of social programs that were geared towards recreational and social interaction, an abundance of which had never existed before in Chicago, and in some cases, even in the United States. For example, Dieser (2004) writes that the Hull- House was the first Settlement

House that offered opportunities and residence for both men and Fig. 4.5 Hull-House library room women. The Hull-House had the first public playground in Chicago, the first public baths in Chicago, the first public gymnasium, provided the first citizenship preparation classes in the United States, and offered the first college extension course in Chicago (p. 2). The Hull-House also had a theater that gave free public performances, a Men’s Club, a library, a gaming room, a dining area that was open to the public, a coffee shop, a public swimming pool, a Women’s Club, a nursery, free child care, a kindergarten, art studios, art education classes, and an art gallery. The significance of the diversity of social programs offered by the Hull-House can be found in the philosophy of art practiced by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr.

57 THE BEGINNING OF ART AT THE HULL-HOUSE

Jane Addams believed strongly that in order to fulfill the Hull-House mission, art would be an important tool. The focus on art at Hull-House quickly became known throughout Chicago, and many people believed that the appreciation and production of art were its main purpose: Fig. 4.6 Entrance to Hull-House parlor, often used as a meeting place for art history lessons, as well as meetings of the Jane Club.

The working people have little opportunity to learn anything of the beautiful in nature and art as it is taught by men of genius and reproduced in books or pictures. This was the reason why these two ladies came to Halsted and Polk streets and there established a house…” (Chicago Herald, 1891, p. 6).

While Jane was involved with creating and promoting a variety of programs for Hull-

House, she also looked to Ellen Starr to provide the majority of the arts curriculum:

The direction of the effort naturally fell into the hands of Miss Starr…who not only feeds her own mind and finds her highest enjoyment in Art, but who believes that every soul has a right to be thus fed and solaced. (Addams, 1895, p. 614)

Within a week of Hull-House’s opening, Ellen Starr had created a regular poetry group for the neighborhood women. Every wall in the entire house was literally filled with works of art, including photographs, lithographs and paintings that Jane and Ellen had collected during their travels in Europe; a welcoming sight for visitors and residents alike. During the initial year of Hull-House, Ellen Starr also created the first of many art

58 history classes. These classes were so popular that students attended them year after

year.

The original point of

incorporating art at Hull-House

was not to provide culture for

residents and visitors, but “as an

expression of the highest human

thought and perception” (Addams,

1895, p. 615). Jane and Ellen’s

hope was to help the surrounding

neighbors value art in their lives,

and to begin to incorporate art in Fig. 4.7 View across the street of Hull-House to surrounding neighborhood. their own living quarters. They

both felt that by teaching about art and art history, the less fortunate of Chicago’s East

Side would find relief from the monotony and grueling nature of their workaday lives:

A few doors down the street a tiny bedroom has been changed from a place in which a fragile factory girl slept the sleep of the exhausted, into one where she “just loves to lie in bed and look at my pictures; it’s so like Art Class.” (Addams, 1895, p. 615)

One of the more novel ways that Jane Addams and Ellen Starr helped art become accessible to their neighborhood was to institute an art lending library (Addams, 1895). Jane and Ellen collected 100 prints, photographs, watercolors, paintings, and lithographs for neighbors to borrow for two weeks at a time. At the end of the two weeks, the borrower could check out a new piece of art, or renew the art that they had already checked out.

59 This domestic level of art education was fundamental to the attitude of respect that Jane Addams and Ellen Starr had towards their charges. By providing art education, and including art for lending to any person who wished it, Hull-House began to attract people from a variety of lifestyles. Mothers, factory workers, secretaries, laborers, wives of businessmen, the poor, the rich, the average, all people were treated equally in regards to art education. This was not

“art for the poor,” but art for all people, regardless of their Fig. 4.8 Hull-House art studio situation or station in life. Art classes were held in the parlor, with rich and poor, young and old meeting to learn together. I imagine the pride and satisfaction that a young mother might have felt while viewing an artwork hanging on her tenement wall that had hung in the house of a prominent businessman the week before. The art-lending program became so popular that soon other Settlement Houses created similar programs. Unlike the Hull-House program, many of these programs charged a small fee for membership. Although paintings of historical and religious themes abounded, some of the most popular paintings were those that outwardly seemed only to convey beauty. However, participants, including program leaders felt that these paintings also served a moral purpose: “One little study of a fisherman is always in demand…the picture conveys the lesson of patience better than any amount of preaching could do” (Pictures Lent to the Poor, 1896, p. 4).

60 THE BUTLER ART GALLERY

The success of the art-lending program quickly led to other endeavors of art education, and especially, a new collaboration. The Chicago Public Library had recently decided to pilot a new program whereby locations around the city would serve as library satellites. Elshtain (2002) notes that patrons could elect to check out and return books at a number of different locations. Addams quickly let the Library know about her intentions to create

the Butler Art Gallery, and so the lower level of the Fig. 4.9 Painting by Corot, one of the artists represented in the first art shows of the early Butler Gallery. soon-to-be gallery first became one of the book delivery stations for the library (p. 37). The Butler Gallery was inspired by a similar program at Toynbee Hall. Many prominent Chicagoans and several international visitors were the guests for the opening of the new gallery at Hull-House. The assembled crowd, including a reporter for the Chicago Tribune were able to preview the works of art that were leant by wealthy art collectors, including the Kellogg family and the Art institute. According to the Chicago Tribune (1891), Barnett was the true inspiration for Chicago’s newest art space:

Mr. Barnett is the founder of Toynbee Hall and of what he calls—"Free Picture Shows" for the people. For eleven years past he has given these picture exhibitions in the noted Whitechapel district, London, which have been attended by over 75,000 people. Each year he has had in these "shows" about 150 pictures of the best class, most of them being the work of noted painters and loaned from the academy or other art galleries or by the artists. His "show" lasts during three weeks at Easter, and he himself and others take delight in pointing out to the

61 humble and ignorant people who crowd around the meaning and the beauties of the works exhibited. Mr. Barnett said that pictures were invaluable for poor. people whose lives fall in the sadder places of existence, because they inspire them and suggest the thoughts of great men and beautiful and beneficent ideas. (p. 6)

Soon after the new two store Victorian attachment was completed to house a permanent exhibition space where up to fifty pictures could be seen at a time, it was christened. Named for E.B. Butler, a local businessman, it was open to anyone who wanted to view the artwork and was organized into specific exhibitions, and a studio. Building upon its success with lending art, among the first exhibitions, oil paintings, old prints and engravings, photography and watercolors were featured. Addams notes the significance of what types of art were shown at the Butler Gallery, and highlights the interactive type of docent that might be found at the gallery in her essay “The Objective Value of a Social Settlement,” written in 1893:

The upper floor of the Butler Gallery is divided into an art exhibition room and studio. Our first art exhibit was opened in June, 1891, by Mr. and Mrs. Barnett, of St. Jude’s. Whitechapel…The pictures were some of the best that Chicago could afford, several by Corot, Watts, and Davis. European country scenes, sea views, and Dutch interiors bring forth many pleasant reminiscences, and the person who is in charge of the pictures to explain them is many times more edified than edifying. (p. 38). According to Addams, from the very beginning early exhibits had an average attendance of 3,000 in a two-week period, the length of each exhibit, and at the end of each exhibition visitors were asked to vote for their favorite piece. Addams also describes the natural ease where the visitors made the transition from shying away from art to becoming an active art participant:

The value of these exhibits to the neighborhood muse, of course, is determined by the value one attaches to the sense of beauty and the pleasure which arises from its contemplation. Classes in free hand drawing and clay modeling are held in the studio of the Butler Gallery. They have been very popular from the first (p. 38).

62 Reverend Barnett from Toynbee Hall also attended the opening of the Butler Gallery. His comments on the power of art clearly indicate the origins of some of Jane Addams own views concerning art for the masses: “By means of pictures life is lightened. The poor have an opportunity of knowing the beautiful and the mental elevation that follows is bound to have a good effect on their lives” (Chicago Herald, 1891, p. 6). Ellen Gates Starr believed that the small gallery space lent itself to the typical person who came to see the pictures. Although she had spent a good deal of time and energy on teaching art in her classes at Hull-House, the number of people who eventually came to the art exhibitions were far many more than could be accommodated in an art class. At one exhibition there were nearly 6,000 visitors. The artwork was very carefully chosen for its “technical excellence7” and to be visually comforting and enlightening to the average viewer. In an article for Forum 19, Addams (1895) explains why she and Ellen Gates Starr chose the art that was shown at Butler Gallery:

The confusion and fatigue of a mind which a person of no trained powers of selection suffers in passing his eyes wearily over the assortment of good, bad, and indifferent which the average picture exhibit presents, leaves him nothing with which to assimilate the good…. Frequently recurring exhibitions of a few very choice pictures might do more toward educating the public taste. (p. 616)

From these beginnings, the Hull-House Art-In-Schools program was born. Addams credits Ellen Gates Starr as the true inspiration for this very successful early art education program in Chicago.

This leads to the “Art in Schools” movement, in which Miss Starr was the Chicago pioneer. With the means at her disposal she has been able to put a

7 Jane Addams quotes Ellen Gates Starr in her article for Forum 19 as stating “To quote Miss Starr, an effort has been made in these exhibits to show only pictures which combine, to a considerable degree, an elevated tone with technical excellence” (p. 615). In fact, many of the art education programs at Hull-House emphasized technical mastery, including the Hull-House Kilns.

63 number of good pictures into each room of the school nearest to Hull-House. A society has since been inaugurated in connection with the Chicago Woman’s Club that has for its object the decorating of all the public schools in the city. Much has already been accomplished in tinting the walls and supplying the rooms with casts and pictures. (p. 616)

Inspired by T.C. Horsfall of Manchester, England, Ellen Starr believed that placing art in schools was an important step for the community. Starr (1895) quoted Horsfall as saying “the decision as to whether art shall be used in education is, to modern communities, a decision as to whether the mass of the people shall be barbarian or civilized” (p. 4). Using art amassed through donation and personal purchases, Ellen Starr began to place artworks in the schools closest to the Hull-House. In connection with the Hull-House, the Chicago Women’s Club began painting the walls of classrooms, providing casts of famous artworks for use in the classroom, and hanging art donated by the Hull-House in the schools. Jane Addams (1895) felt that this direct form of art education was a move in a positive direction towards the lessening of the burden of poverty among children: “The significance of the pictures are carefully explained to the children, and there is no doubt that the imagination receives a strong impulse towards the heroic and historic” (p. 617).

64

Chapter V: The Labor Museum and Its Relationship to Immigration

IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES

The period between 1815-1900 was one of the most dramatic increases in population that the United States had ever experienced. The United States was seen as a land that was open to people of different countries to make their new home. The image of the United States as Canaan of milk and honey, where unlimited fertile land, easy

job opportunities and freedom of religious and other expression must have glowed beacon-like in the minds of hungry farmers, the urban poor and religious outcast. Not unlike the current state of

affairs, immigration to America was also 5.1 A woman is being inspected upon arrival at Ellis Island. a particularly tricky affair, in some ways familiar, and other ways unimaginable by today’s standards. Beginning with the first large wave of immigration in 1815, the gates to the United States were open wide to anyone who could survive the treacherous journey. It was often fraught with difficulties unimaginable prior to such a journey across the sea. Frequently people died from malnourishment and disease; the sight of a young child being thrown overboard was not uncommon. In “The Immigrant and the Community,” Grace Abbott (1917), Director of the Immigrant Protection League of Chicago wrote about the dangers in crossing the ocean:

The death-rate during the crossing was appalling. According to Friedrich Kapp, chairman of the New York Board of Emigration Commissioners, a death-rate of

65 10 per cent was not uncommon, while sometimes as many as one third of the entire number died. Often, for example, the Irish famine victims, whose power of resistance had already been shattered, escaped from their stricken country only to die at sea. (p. 3)

A simple thing like a lemon could mean the difference between life and death from scurvy for paying fares, and for the captive slaves held below in the belly of the ship, not even a lemon could stave off the horror not knowing what lay beyond the terrible six weeks at sea on a crowded boat. Abbott (1917) described the well-known difficulties of the journey to America for early immigrants:

Then the sailing vessel was still the usual means of crossing the Atlantic, travelers were required to furnish their own food and bedding for a journey that usually lasted a month or six weeks, and sometimes days or even weeks longer. Complaints of fearful overcrowding without regard for sex or age, of gross immorality, and of cruelty on the part of officers and crew were made in newspapers as well as before congressional investigating committees. (p. 3)

Upon arrival in America, more dangers awaited. And while the dangers of immigration would continue to include the journey across the sea itself, conditions over time began to improve for the immigrant journey. However, now the imminent threat would become the very people and environment of the new world itself. For early immigrants to more rural parts of the United States, frequent disagreements with the American Indians who already occupied much of the territory being advertised as available to newcomers was a serious issue. In some cases new groups were able to write a treaty as a compromise to each, and in other cases, not. Whether or not a community was able to find a resolution often depended on the charisma and knowledge of public leaders who were dedicated to finding a peaceful resolution. In one example, the Fisher- Miller land grant between the Llano and Colorado Rivers in Texas comprised the hunting grounds for the native Comanche tribes. In response to the influx of immigrants arriving under the protection of the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants, Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, promised new residents peace with the surrounding tribes.

66 According to author Otto Tetzloff, (2010), the final result was a treaty between the new immigrants and the American Indians.

The final session took place on March 1 and 2, 1847, at the lower San Saba, about twenty-five miles from the Colorado River. The treaty was made between the head chiefs Buffalo Hump, Santa Anna, and others, and Meusebach—called by the Comanches El Sol Colorado, because of his red flowing beard. It was ratified in Fredericksburg two months later. The treaty allowed Meusebach's settlers to go unharmed into Indian territory and the Indians to go to the white settlements; promised mutual reports on wrongdoing; and provided for survey of lands in the San Saba area with a payment of at least $1,000 to the Indians8.

In urban areas, the threat was of a different kind, although still harbored an apparent tendency towards limiting immigration. Frequently new arrivals would find themselves in a situation where they were being extorted for money, or being unfairly treated. It was such a common experience that beginning in 1848, laws began to be passed protecting the rights of immigrants9. Abbott (1917) describes such a scenario in The Immigrant and the Community:

In the early nineteenth century, the trials of the immigrant did not end with the fearful journey across the Atlantic, for wherever they landed they were met by a small army of exploiters. Runners who spoke their language piloted them to boarding houses where they were held until their little money was exhausted, or employment agents and bogus railroad representatives robbed and misdirected them. Before the regulation of immigration was taken over by the United States, a number of the States had taken steps to prevent these abuses. New York especially had developed machinery that had for its object the guarding of the newly arrived immigrant from fraud and exploitation, not only at the port of New York but in cities in the interior of the State. (p. 5)

Urban centers began to form and immediately became overcrowded. With the election of Abraham Lincoln and the battle of the Civil War, the landscape changed dramatically once again. By the 1860s the doors of America were still open to

8 Article accessed through the Handbook of Texas Online. 9 Laws of New York, 1848, Chap. 219.

67 newcomers, however, now specifically to a new type of immigrant. The promise made to immigrants from across the Atlantic, and specifically during this time in China, was for gold. Chinese immigrants, typically male, made the journey to America to work in mining operations in California, with the intention of returning home quickly with piles of gold. Lured by the promise of riches, including land in exchange for a term of labor, these immigrants were essentially treated as indentured servants. When there was no gold or riches to be found, railroad companies shipped workers across the American territories to build an entire infrastructure

(Zhou, p. 143). Railroad companies owned vast amounts of undeveloped land paid for advertising to different populations and countries, including working out a reduced fare with the ship companies to secure cheap human labor, now Fig. 5.2 Immigrant children play in the street next to a that open slavery was no longer th dead horse in the 19 Ward of Chicago. available. This practice went on until a law was passed in 1862, preventing the importation of Chinese labor10. Interestingly, these same companies made good on their promises often enough that a new type of land-owning citizen emerged in the American landscape, a citizen who was eager to tell others from back home what resources would be available to them. In fact, the numbers of immigrants at this time on any given day at Ellis Island were staggering, and in five years, over 1.5 million immigrants were processed at that port alone 11.

10 Known as the “Coolie Trade Law.” 11 According to the Ellis Island Museum’s website, the Ellis Island center processed 11,747 immigrants in one day at its peak in 1907.

68 It is during this period of overwhelming numbers of new arrivals that the doorway to legal immigration to America began to visibly close. Now some immigrants faced a new threat, not being able to come to America at all. Upon boarding, each passenger knew that that they could not get ill on the journey, because if they did they would not be allowed to get off the ship once it had arrived. According to Motomura (2006) some state laws required Ship Masters to guarantee that their passengers would be financially able to support themselves upon arrival, or were ready and willing to work. These bonds or passenger taxes were often paid into a fund to help keep “undesirables” out of Fig. 5.3 Immigration records from 1870 from New York. America (p. 21). Frequently children were hid in blankets and boxes to prevent the health officers of the ship from knowing that anyone had contracted any type of contagion. Upon arrival, health cards that passengers had been forced to wear on the ship’s journey were inspected to insure that all new immigrants were of good health. After their belongings were searched and catalogued, new arrivals were sent to quarantine where they were examined for health issues, many of which were now considered to be reason for denial to America. Eyelids were turned over to determine illness, and problems with weight, height, posture, even glasses could warrant an unpaid

69 trip back home. Additional questions for screening purposes were more involved, even upon passing the required health inspection. According to Frost (2003), “Medical officials checked immigrants for diseases. The officials made chalk marks on immigrants’ clothing to indicate any medical problems. The letter “L” indicated an immigrant was lame and had difficulty walking. The letter “X” suggested a mental illness. About 20 percent of arriving immigrants received a chalk mark” (p. 17). For women, the issue of being single would be a reason to deny entry, due to the issue of an unverifiable virtue. Friedman-Kasaba (1996) writes that:

Especially disturbing to the Immigration Commission was that its standard controls against the “importation and harboring of women for immoral purposes” were being evaded by, in its view, particularly devious “professional prostitutes.” Each and every lone woman lone woman, traveling third class, entering the U.S. for the first time, and headed toward New York had been ordered to be held at Ellis Island until such time as they were retrieved by a relative or a friend. (p. 143)

For everyone who arrived, a surname that was given as their new identity might influence where one would be able to live in the urban centers. During this period of history, it was not uncommon for people to give false “Americanized” names or have one given to them by immigration officials. Additional details on the incoming immigration form included whether or not the immigrant knew anyone in the United States, what their occupation was, and if they were an anarchist. Anarchists were considered to be at the top of the list of undesirables, and numerous records of court cases concerning their reported arrival to the United States still exist. According to records from the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the United States Congress (1891), an early case from Cincinnati makes clear the disdain for any type of immigrant who tried to naturalize under the auspices of anarchy:

Q. You believe in letting the anarchists come here then and have their own way?—A. No, sir; not much. I would dispose of them a good deal sooner after it

70 is learned they are anarchist. People will say a man is an anarchist when they don't know anything about it The other day there was a man walking along the street, and I was walking with a gentleman, who said, "that man is an anarchist," and I said, "what is he?" ''Why he is an honest carpenter, and works every day for his family." If you can show it and prove that a man is an anarchist, why deport him. Q. Then you inform this committee from your experience, from your residence licre since 1850, you are not aware of any undesirable immigrants coming to Cincinnati ?—A. That none have come. Q. That no undesirable classes of immigration have come to Cincinnati ?—A. No, sir; not classes. (p. 822)

Failure to answer questions in a way that satisfied the immigration officer would mean the immigrant would be denied entry, and forced to return home. According to records as late as 1902, practices at ports of immigration included a wide variety of ever changing tests meant to help control population growth, and signaled the continuing trend towards nativism in the United States:

Just as the illiteracy test is designed not only to secure rudimentary education on the part of immigrants, but also and chiefly to exclude those undesirable for general reasons, so a physical test would bar out not merely persons of poor physique or physically defective or imperfect, but, in addition, a considerable proportion of those liable to become paupers and diseased. The present laws exclude all who are mentally diseased in such a way as to be a burden on the community; that is to say, the insane, idiots, and persons who have been insane within a few years; and, on the physical side, those with dangerous or loathsome contagious diseases. The next logical step, therefore, if there is to be a further restriction, would seem to be to stiffen the requirements for admission, both on the mental and on the physical side. On this account it has often been argued that if there is to be an educational test there should be a physical test as well; and many go further and hold that the relation between ap- 1 parent physique and desirability, is much closer than between the mental intelligence, necessary to read and write, I and desirability, inasmuch as the physical condition of/ the individual determines to a great extent his capacity and opportunity for acquiring education. (p. 258)

Once legally emigrated, a new problem arose for arrivals. The people who had come to the United States many years before, or whose families had been part of the first wave of immigration in earlier times from generations ago did not like that people were

71 continuing to arrive on a daily basis. A movement towards nativism, the belief that earlier immigrants were somehow more American than new arrivals, easily permeated alleys and streets of New York and Chicago, often resulting in competing gangs battling for limited resources including food and shelter, and was the basis for the original Ku Klux Klan. Accounts of the origins of urban violence are not uncommon in literature from the 1900s onwards, almost entirely in regards to newly emigrated populations. In 1922, a teacher’s magazine for teachers attempted to explain the issue of nativism in terms of recent population growth and continuing changing ideas about immigration to the United States:

During the last generation, the character of our immigration has so greatly changed that it has caused alarm and dismay among many "native" Americans. We are therefore perhaps more familiar with the economic, social and political problems which the Slav, and the East and South-European in general, have brought to America. But here also much of our information undoubtedly rests upon prejudice, rather than scientific investigation….The A. P. A. movement in the nineties, such orders as the "Guardians of Liberty," and some aspects of the recent revival of the Ku Klux Klan all illustrate that the spirit of political nativism is not dead.

Gone was the notion that the gateway to immigration to the United States was open to all, or even most, and now it was replaced with overcrowded cities drowning in garbage and chaos. The hatred for “new” immigrants continued to boil well into 1889, when Hull-House opened, and it is in this environment that Addams and Starr chose to begin their quest for liberating the Chicago populace from the horrors of mass development.

RATIONAL FOR THE LABOR MUSEUM AND ITS IMPACT

To say that the conditions of labor were difficult for many factory and industrial workers in Chicago during the latter half of the 1800s would be a severe understatement.

It was not uncommon for immigrant laborers including women and children, to work on

72 average from 10-15 hours a day, six days a week, for very minimal pay that was often less than six dollars a week. According to journalist at Maria Hart (1990), conditions as journalists in the same neighborhood reported them in 1889 were grim:

First in violence, deepest in dirt, loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling.’ In 1889, Chicago’s population was 78 percent immigrant or the children of immigrants. The 19th Ward, rife with political graft then known as `boodle,’ had some 50,000 Italians, Russian and Polish Jews, Irish, Greeks, Bohemians, Germans and Chinese crammed into a neighborhood the density of Calcutta. Children worked in factories from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. for wages of between 40 cents and $4 a week. (p. 6)

Multiple families lived in quarters built for a single household. At the same time, the sudden explosion in population growth resulted in housing shortages, and multiple immigrant families often shared tiny vacated shelters and rooming houses which surrounded the factories, called tenements (Boris, 1989; Ward, 1968). The replacement of laborers with machinery had become the rule, rather than the exception, to the reality of factory operations. Expansion to the west left

factories low on labor resource, yet the demand for goods increased as the population grew rapidly.

Business and factory owners

Fig. 5.4 A typical tenement. Note the number of individuals looked to industrialization as including children that are sharing this tiny room. a means to replace workers

who had left in pursuit of owning land (Stankiewicz, 1992). As a result, an entire

73 population of new immigrants found themselves forced to endure the harsh working and living environments of the urban landscape, since they could be threatened with being replaced by a machine. On May 1, 1886, three years before the formation of Hull-House, a group of union workers participated in a strike, calling for an eight-hour workday. Albert Parsons, along with 80,000 striking factory workers began a protest march down central Chicago’s Michigan Avenue. This was an important moment in Chicago history; the schism between laborer and businessman grew even wider. In the next few days, strikers were joined by thousands of additional workers, and on May 3, at McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, police killed three strikers when they charged Fig. 5.5 Haymarket Square, location of the labor union riots. the picket lines. Reports of the protest and subsequent riot reverberated throughout the working population of America, and many of the individuals who were involved in the Haymarket event were hurt. In the 1897 volume of the Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents Vol. X, Richardson states that:

There occurred a conflict between the police and the strikers, in which several of the workingmen were wounded. On the next day, Anarchists called a meeting of protest in Haymarket Square, at which various speakers delivered incendiary speeches. When a speaker openly exhorted his hearers to resort to violence, the police tried to disperse the meeting, only to be met with a dynamite bomb which killed and wounded a number of the officers and bystanders. Seven anarchists were tried for murder as a result of the bomb-throwing, of whom four were

74 hanged, one committed suicide, and two were sentenced to jail terms, only to be pardoned some years later. (p. 4594) Workers across Chicago were outraged, and a call to arms went out across the city. Incited by the infamous anarchist August Spies, disgruntled workers met at Haymarket Square to protest. The next day, police attempted to disperse the protesters, and a bomb was thrown at the police line, killing an officer. The police began to open fire on the protesters, killing twelve. Albert Parsons, August Spies and five others were later hung for their actions, setting off an explosive debate across Chicago concerning the nature of labor and workers rights (Flinn, 1887; Carter, 1958). As a result, by the time that Addams and Starr had formed the Hull-House, nearly 300 unions had been created in Chicago. Once Addams formed Hull-House in 1889 and had taken

up residence in the middle of the neighborhoods plagued by labor dispute, she was no longer physically disconnected from problems of workers and the apparent need for labor unions.

There were no labor unions for

Fig. 5.6 Child labor laws are campaigned for by Florence Kelly, an early Hull-House resident.

75 women or children who made up a vast percentage of the factory workers, with the exception of the bookbindery women’s union. With Jane Addams and Florence Kelly at the helm, Hull-House residents sought legislation to limit the amount of time a woman or child could be required to perform labor. In 1893, the eight-hour workday law was passed, including its limitations on child labor. Sklar (1985) writes that, “The 1893 statute made it possible for women as well as men to move from exploitative, low-paying sweatshops into larger shops and factories with power machinery, unions, and higher wages” (p. 675). However, the legislation was later deemed unconstitutional in 1895, and the Chicago Tribune reported, “Labor is a property and an interference with the sale of it by contract or otherwise is an infringement of a constitutional right…. The property rights of women…are the same as those of men” (p. 676). The relationship between industrial labor and the process of crafting products was clearly a significant issue for Jane Addams, as well as other thinkers during this time. According to Efland (1990) as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century “the factory had supplanted the craft workshop” (p. 50). At the turn of the nineteenth century the Aesthetic Movement, as typified by British thinkers such as John Ruskin and Walter Smith, began the attempt to reform poor quality in manufacturing by creating a greater demand for high quality goods. Consumers were “being taught not to just buy a table, but to buy the right table…similar to the table that might be found in the homes of the ‘better’ classes” (Stankiewicz, 1992). During this time, the notion of a correct art education was that it should be largely concerned with aesthetics, including teaching members of society how to determine the beauty of a thing (Bookwalter, 1904). However, due to an increased demand for “aestheticized goods,” the Aesthetic Movement’s ultimate effect on manufacturing in the United States was that it ceased to divide types of workers into categories that were design or art oriented, particularly in terms of the decorative arts, from those involved in large-scale manufacturing of goods in factories. As a consequence, there was a decreased demand for objects created in the

76 home, particularly those created by women, such as quilts, textiles, lace, garments and woven materials, and also a decreased payment for those goods. According to Stankiewicz (1992), the Aesthetic Movement’s art education thought to “prepare workers to work in art industries as well as in the larger mass manufacturing” (p. 167). However, its effect on domestic industry was devastating. This attitude toward manufacturing began to shift again in the 1880s, as the Arts and Crafts movement criticized the notion that “anything made by a machine could truly be artistic” (Stankiewicz, p. 169, 1992). Arts and Crafts contemporaries like William

Morris, and again John Ruskin, taught the notion that “good art could only come from a good person in a good society” (Stankiewicz, p. 169, 1992). One might expect that this would lead to a positive change for immigrant women working at home in traditional crafts who were being paid an unfair wage. In reality, it lead to immigrant women working at places of mass manufacture at factories that produced cheap imitations of the goods of traditional domestic craft, and continued to pay the women very poorly (Sklar, 1985).

LABOR MUSEUM PHILOSOPHY

As evidenced by her previous actions towards labor reform and helping create labor unions for women, Jane Addams had already demonstrated that she was significantly concerned by the nature of factory work and its separation of art from craft within industrialized goods manufacturing. However, Addams believed that it was in the nature of the industrialized production of the goods themselves that many factory workers seemed to have lost their connection with traditional crafts native to their home countries. Addams saw that the average factory worker had become unable to withstand the “times of transition…were big with suffering” (Addams, 1900), as required by their new labor- intensive lives in America. No longer was the worker an artisan, creating merchandise steeped in time-honored tradition, but he or she had become merely a cog in a great

77 machine, responsible for merely a tiny portion of the end product. Addams (1910) believed that as a result, the daily life of an average laborer threatened the ability for a community to prosper, particularly for young women:

These girls also encountered a special danger in the early morning hours as they returned from work, debilitated and exhausted…. One of the girls … had thus been decoyed into a saloon, where the soft drink was followed by an alcoholic one containing “knockout drops,” and she awoke in a disreputable rooming house–too frightened and disgraced to return to her mother. (pg. 203)

Addams’ concern for young women laborers, working long and dangerous hours over machines that producing quality items that seemed which ironically handmade, is reflected in many such observations concerning the typical Hull-House visitor. However,

Addams was also concerned for the welfare of child laborers. As she viewed it, “The visits we made in the neighborhood constantly discovered women sewing upon sweatshop work, and often they were assisted by incredibly small children” (p. 198).

Addams determined that the divorce of labor from craft was especially evident in terms of the cultural division that had occurred between the new generation born in

America, and their immigrant parents. As a consequence, five years after the hard-won eight- hour labor legislation was revoked, in 1900, the Hull-

House Labor Museum was created. Addams (1910) did

Fig. 5.7 Children working in a textile factory.

78 not address the problems of labor solely through supporting and facilitating unionization, but she also likewise affirmed that the life and travails of the average worker must be lifted from the monotony of mechanistic labor by reuniting art, craft, and labor. She also emphasized that the labor conditions that visitors to the Hull-House were experiencing were part of a larger picture, which included every advance of industry upon human art and craft tradition in history. Addams thought that by providing a place and a context for immigrant families to meet and share with each other a traditional art making process, families and communities could reunite, thus paving the way for other types of social and labor reform. In Twenty Years at Hull-House Addams (1910) writes:

Human progress is slow and perhaps never more cruel than in the advance of industry, but is not the worker comforted by knowing that other historical periods have existed similar to the one in which he finds himself, and that the readjustment may be shortened and alleviated by judicious action? (p. 240)

At this time, middle class Victorian ideals imported to America had perpetuated the notion in society that the proper place for a women’s work was in the domestic sphere

of the home, and therefore,

it would be incorrect for a

“lady” to work outside of

that sphere, whereas men

were expected to do so.

This was an impossible

standard to uphold for

immigrant women whose

Fig. 5.8 Demonstration of spinning and weaving at the Labor impoverished situation Museum.

79 required that they no longer accept tiny wages for their home work, and that all members of the family needed work, including children. This division of labor influenced the fabric of society, to the peril of all women who relied on work outside the home to replace the work they previously completed at home. One exception to this could be found in the realm of domestic level artwork, particularly weaving, embroidery, and decoration, as it was supported by charitable organizations in an attempt to keep mothers at home.

In the early 1890s, the Arts and Crafts Movement was naturally embraced by residents at Hull-House because it afforded training opportunities in the so-called

“practical arts” for women to continue working from the home (Callen, 1985). Addams decided that it was not helpful to relegate the realm of women’s artwork to mere decorative labors, as the reality of immigrant women’s work was that they either toil in a factory, or must utilize their skills by working from home in traditional craft, but be severely underpaid. In response to her growing ideas about labor reform and its relationship to the domestic sphere of women’s work, Fig. 5.9 Looms and textile weaving workshop adjacent to the Labor Museum. one of the first exhibits to be opened at the Labor Museum centered on the history of textiles, specifically, the methods of spinning and weaving. Located on the first floor of the new gymnasium, the Labor

80 Museum would showcase techniques by immigrant women, working alongside examples of current-day industrial weaving machines that they utilized daily in the factory, maps of early soil and wool gathering regions in Europe, and lectures by industrial experts

(Addams, 1902). Chicago journalists and visitors to the Labor Museum exhibit took note of the educational purpose of the exhibit and class space with interest (Pond, 1902):

On the first floor [of the 1901 Gymnasium building is] ... in front, the labor museum—to illustrate and in the mind of the worker integrate the various industrial processes from the raw material to the manufactured article through crude early hand processes to modern power machinery. In the south end [of the 1901 Gymnasium building are] the shops for classes in mechanical drawing, wood and metalworking and pottery molding. (p. 180)

Even from its inception, Addams (1902) practiced the idea that the Labor

Museum would entertain visitors as well as educate them: “Two sound educational principles we may perhaps claim for the labor museum…first, that it concentrates and

dramatizes the inherited resources of a

man’s occupation, and, secondly, that it

conceives of education as ‘continuing

reconstruction of experience’” (p. 15).

Addams also intended for the Labor

Museum to grow in size and in scope.

She saw the need for exhibitions that

included various types of woodworking, bookbinding, textiles, grains, metals Fig. 5.10 Hull-House Kilns stamp. and pottery, essentially all forms of manufacturing present in Chicago. Perhaps most importantly, every new exhibition

81 subject would coincide with the building and operation of an actual workshop that would produce sizable quantities of manufactured goods for sale, Hull-House style. Addams’ trade manufacturing philosophy likely emphasized the artistry and craft of the workshop, and not the sweatshop that laborers endured in their workaday lives, and would possibly have resulted in more fare trade prices for certain sought-after commodities. At the opening of the Labor Museum, the Chicago Daily Tribune (1902) noted:

Those who sat at the spinning-wheels, each whirring machine being typical of the national life represented, were "neighbors" of Hull House—residents of the district who had come to Chicago from the countries mentioned and become American citizens. Choirs of singers from the music school of Hull House sang spinning songs, the choruses of the weavers and the workers in similar trades. In another room deft fingers twisted strips of willow and lengths of cane into baskets of many forms and of as many colors. All these workers had learned their art and skill in the classrooms of the West Side institutions, over which Miss Jane Addams presides. (p. 13)

Addams saw the potential for the Labor Museum to not only showcase artwork done through traditional craft by residents and visitors, but also saw the opportunity for

Hull-House to act as a school whereby visitors, particularly women, could gain valuable technical skills that would enable them to advance in their industrial careers. Addams

(1902) wrote, “Four Hull-House shops already exist, not merely for the sake of teaching, but primarily for the sake of producing” (p. 15). The idea that the Hull-House Labor

Museum could become a center of economic growth through the training of immigrant women, as well as a safe harbor of cultural practice, was groundbreaking as well as a far cry from the sympathetic but ineffective notion of social welfare practiced by other charity organizations. At its core, the Labor Museum existed as a means by which, through art education, the workers in the neighborhoods surrounding Hull-House would become empowered enough to desire unionization, and thereby change their lives for the

82 better. In essence, Addams sought to organize, and perhaps unionize, the cottage level industry of women workers. Addams wrote:

The labor movement may be called a concerted effort among the workers in all trades to obtain a more equitable distribution of the product, and to secure a more orderly existence for the laborers. If the design of the settlement is not so much the initiation of new measures, but fraternal co-operation with all good which it finds in its neighborhood, then the most obvious line of action will be organization through the trades-unions, a movement already well established. (p. 14)

The relationship between industrial labor and the art process was significant for both Jane Addams and Ellen Starr; thusly it became of the daily discussion and lifestyle issues at the core of Hull-House. Starr believed that the daily life of an average laborer posed a considerable threat to the ability for art to prosper within a community, and within individuals. Starr (1895) described the life of an industrial worker as being “in a state of siege. He is fighting for his life” (p. 31). In order to lift the workers to state where art could be received and created, Starr believed that the life and travails of the average worker must be lifted from the monotony of mechanistic labor. When the Labor Museum at Hull-House opened in 1900, Addams’ intention was to present a connection between the skills and crafts that immigrants had brought with them to the United States and their daily life as a laborer. Art education historian Patricia Amburgy (1990) writes that Addams “saw art as a way of helping workers tolerate the Fig. 5.11 Labor Museum workshop, adjacent to the Labor Exhibit. conditions of industrial labor,

83 rather than a means of changing the nature of the work itself” (p. 106). Addams (1902) believed that by reconnecting the laborer to the history and tradition of their craft, they would be lifted from the drudgery of their occupation. Additionally, the growing chasm between the younger New Americans and their immigrant parents and grandparents might be lessened:

Such a demonstration, it was believed, would not only prove educational, but might have an indirect social result. The children, and more ambitious young people of the colony, are inclined to look down upon the simpler Italians who posses…skill…partly because they consider them…un-American…It was hoped that giving the older people a chance to use their skill might lead to several distinct results. (p. 1)

One of the first exhibits to be opened at the Labor Museum centered on the history of textiles, specifically, the methods of spinning and weaving. The museum showcased several different means for making fiber into thread, including Italian, Navajo, Russian, Syrian, and Irish methods. Immigrant women demonstrated these techniques in the museum while working alongside examples of current-day industrial weaving machines, maps of early soil and wool gathering regions in Europe, and lectures by industrial experts. Additionally, the exhibit used demonstrations of weaving baskets and models of Navajo looms in the children’s basket weaving classes that took place in the museum, providing a novel type of hands-on museum experience especially for visiting children who were used to working in a factory. Addams progressive ideas about labor, and her method of introducing modern manufacturing trades as dangerous to personal art and craft were no less than visionary. As an advocate for labor reform, Addams saw the utility in helping the working poor to realize the skill of their industrialized talents. By helping workers understand that they were a marginalized population of artisans, Addams was able to directly influence the history of labor in Chicago. In her article “The Settlement as Factor in the Labor

84 Movement” (1895), Addams discusses her belief that the Settlement House movement will find its most important venue through the newly formed trade unions of Chicago, through which the first labor unions and child labor laws came into being:

The labor movement may be called a concerted effort among the workers in all trades to obtain a more equitable distribution of the product, and to secure a more orderly existence for the laborers. If the design of the settlement is not so much the initiation of new measures, but fraternal co-operation with all good which it finds in its neighborhood, then the most obvious line of action will be organization through the trades-unions, a movement already well established. (p. 14)

Looking at the localized history of the Hull-House, and placing Jane Addams’ efforts towards labor reform in a context that embraces the political, cultural and social events and thoughts of her time, shows that she sought to empower the working class while preserving the female dominated domestic sphere. Addams did not rely solely on giving public speeches about labor reform, just as she did not merely advocate for the working poor by providing food, shelter, and education; she also practiced her belief that it was the right of all people to have access to art in its many forms, including those forms of craft that the immigrant population had brought with them from Europe. Addams was particularly concerned with those women who had been economically forced from practicing art and craft in their homes. Additionally, Addams had a particular talent for attracting, organizing, and working with some of the most important female figures in American history, including Ellen Gates Starr and Florence Kelly, among many others. According to Sklar (1985),

In the 1890s the social settlement movement supplied a perfect structure for women seeking secular means of influencing society because it collectivized their talents, it placed and protected them among the working-class immigrants whose lives demanded amelioration, and it provided them with access to the male political arena while preserving their independence from male-dominated institutions. (p. 664)

85 It would not be correct to define the art education that was performed at Hull-

House as stemming from only one or two individuals, or referring to only the specific art history or studio art classes as art education as divorced from the rest of the varied experience that Hull-House offered to its visitors. The Labor Museum was part of the cohesive structure of Hull-House, and not separated from the rest of the Hull-House and the efforts of its residents. However, the Labor Museum was particularly specialized in its emphasis on the unique relationship between art, labor, and the domestic sphere of women, and its goals were realized in a way that is unlikely to have been achieved through other means.

The nature of the ways Hull-House operated in the Nineteenth Ward demonstrates dramatically that Hull-House’s mission in the beginning was in fact social justice through art education, especially as it applied to immigrants, particularly women and children. As opposed to illustrating that Jane Addams viewed art education as an opiate for an unhappy immigrant population, I believe it is more engaging and instructive to study her views utilizing art education as a vehicle for community organization. My concern for art education is that the discussion of Jane Addams as an important art educator seems to have ended with Amburgy’s (1990) statement that Addams “was not unusual in limiting her conception of art to an ‘idealization’ of industrial labor that would make it appear meaningful to workers” (p. 108). I can understand how both Amburgy and Stankiewicz came to the conclusion that Jane Addams did not view art education as a method of social reform, especially considering that they both cited the same education historian from

1976 (Violas) who pigeonholed Jane Addams as an idealist rather than a reformer. I have looked at Addams with a differently contextualized lens and it has given me a variant

86 historical result. Like many thinkers of her time, Jane Addams saw the need to work on the most pragmatic and idealistic aspects of problems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Workers needed decent work conditions, good pay, and a sense that what they were doing was meaningful; these were all important issues to Addams.

Additionally, Addams saw value in the artwork already being done by Hull-House visitors, especially newly arrived immigrant women. These issues were important to the founders of Hull-House, the latter particularly so with the Labor Museum. Addams is an important thinker in the history of art education because she realized that a sense of meaning and worth could be conveyed through an art education in an interactive museum setting that honored her visitors’ unique knowledge.

Addams believed it was important to the cause of history that the average person’s story be considered as equally significant as those individuals who are easily placed in the spotlight. In this way, Addams seems to foresee the feminist paradigm of the fact that the personal is often political. Addams (1900) did not believe that history came from the significance of wars that had been fought, or the record of what laws had been enacted or repealed, but was found in the daily life of the worker, and the reality of their craft.

To put all historic significance upon city walls and triumphal arches, is to teach history from the political and governmental side, which too often presents solely the records of wars and restrictive legislation, emphasizing that which destroys life and property rather than the processes of labor, which really create and conserve civilization. (p. 3)

In the next and final chapter of this thesis, I will summarize the main points discussed concerning Addams’ use of the Labor Museum towards a more unified community in her district of Chicago. In addition, I will introduce one possible model from Addams’

87 experiences at Hull-House that may be useful in museum education, and explain how it was utilized in a contemporary museum setting.

88 Chapter VI: Using the Labor Museum Exhibit Model to Understand One Issue in Museums Today

It is significant the Addams and the residents of Hull-House began their settlement mission with open access to art education, and from that perspective, discussions about the nature of art and labor became a natural and regular occurrence. The topic of labor and labor reform was of such importance that in response the Chicago Arts and Crafts movement was formed in the main house’s front parlor. The presence of members of the founders of the Jane Club labor unions including Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr helped to also speed the process towards the liberation of children from the local factories, as well as ensure higher pay and less demanding hours for working women. Against the backdrop of mass immigration, Addams and her cohorts became skilled at understanding and providing immigrants in the Halsted Street neighborhood with necessary services, as well introducing a variety of people who had been in Chicago for some time with the culture and mores of new arrivals. Addams (1907) did not seem to be interested in a melting pot form of democracy, but advocated for the uniqueness of each individual culture including religious freedom as it came to be expressed in terms of the “new” American ideals of peace (p. 226).

TWO TYPES OF MUSEUM EXHIBITS, ONE SHARED ROOF

The early exhibit style of the Butler Art Gallery and later, the Labor Museum exhibit at Chicago Hull-House are examples of two different types of museum exhibits happening under one Fig. 6.1 Painting by Enella Benedict, A Hull- House art teacher and successful painter.

89 roof. On one hand, the Butler Gallery resembled a traditional museum setting, whereby visitors could view the art hanging on the wall, and participate in learning about art at weekly meetings. When the Butler Gallery was first formed, art education was taught with a formal, art historical approach. Visitors were taught to appreciate works of art based on their aesthetic properties, while at the same time learning to mimic the same styles as were being shown to them. In addition, several of the residents of Hull-House were talented artists in their own right. Enella Benedict, an early fixture at the settlement, also taught art classes there for many years. It is interesting to note an example of one of her student’s work, where the student clearly represents Benedict’s style in her own self- portrait. By contrast, in 1900 and during the time of the Labor Museum’s opening, the Arts and Crafts movement in Chicago was well under way. Unlike the Butler Gallery’s initial use as a simple parlor of 50 rotating artworks, Addams’ new exhibit emphasized that the people who were to come to the labor exhibit were also a part of the exhibit. The notion of interactivity as a learning instrument was not born with the Labor Museum, but was practiced wholeheartedly throughout the entire span of arts education at Hull-House. As a consequence, the notion of the Butler Gallery as a static gallery of copies work by dead European artists changed. The gallery began to feature work by students, including showcasing students working with ceramics, drawing and painting throughout the house. From this point forward, the mission of Hull-House began to become fully fused with providing quality art education including studio techniques as more than foundational, but also operational. By 1910, the Hull-House Kilns stamp became a widely recognized symbol of quality ceramics and meticulous artistry, as well as a labor union organization. Accounts of Hull-House’s Jane Club in connection with the kilns became popular knowledge during this time, and was recorded in the Handbook of Settlements from

1911:

90 The Jane Club (1891), a co-operative boarding club for young women, has a separate building and meets current expenses of rent, service, food and heat. Two co-operative clubs for young men have been attached to the house, the Phalanx Club from 1892 to 1895, and the Culver Club from 1907 to 1910. A co-operative coal club was organized in 1892 on the Hull-House block, and was successfully carried on for three years. Started an employment bureau (1891), and much informal work in securing employment is still carried on. Since 1908, several meetings to discuss problems of the unemployed have been called. Active in securing the enforcement of the employment agency law, and in cooperation with the League for the Protection of Immigrants, organized meetings among the Bulgarians which made a successful resistance to the extortionate fees which were being charged by the agencies. The Hull-House shops dispose of textiles, articles in metal, and pottery; and there is a growing demand for its products. (p. 57)

Of some confusion is the notion of the Labor Museum as a completely separate entity or intact structure within the growing Hull-House compound, such as one might think of when considering a contemporary museum. This was not the case for Addams’ museum. While it is true that the labor exhibit was housed in the first new building adjacent to the original house structure, when examining photographs of its interior a new fact emerges. The Labor Museum was an exhibit in the space located on the upper floors of the newly developed gymnasium building, with an adjacent studio space. When visiting the Hull-House Museum in Chicago in 2006, I did have the opportunity to ask a docent there about the Labor Museum. It was at that point that I first learned that there was no separate “museum” structure or building per se, but that the concept of “museum” had been applied to this particular exhibit to differentiate it from the rest of the Hull-House programs. Specifically, the Labor Museum was a place for people to come and express their community identity, and to also build solidarity among immigrant youth and their older family members. The Labor Museum was best suited to occur in the gymnasium building in order to be able to accommodate the number of visitors that Addams anticipated would visit. She may have believed the Labor Museum would eventually become an entity in and of its self.

91 At its peak the Hull-House Settlement boasted 13 buildings rather than its original single Victorian mansion, and that the entire settlement became the studio workspace for a wide variety of arts-related activities. It is probable then that the Labor Museum operated in tandem with Starr’s original goals for the Butler Gallery, rather than in contrast to them. Therefore, the less feasible argument that Starr was largely responsible for art education at Hull-House becomes a moot point, as the Labor Museum was operated by Starr alongside Addams, and included the work of many of the house residents and visitors.

The notion that the crafts created by the variety of cultures in the Halsted neighborhood would be showcased must have seemed quite appealing to Addams, and would become even more attractive to her once it was realized that Hull-House could manufacture its own goods. The Labor Museum was received with positive remarks, and thus artwork created at Hull-House eventually was able to fund the building of a permanent art school structure.

VISITOR EXPECTATION AND RESPONSE TO MUSEUM’S COLLECTIONS AND EXHIBITS Of great interest to me is the idea that a museum is reportedly responsible only for what it claims in its mission statement. On the other hand, society has its own general impression of what a museum is, what it does, and what one does when visiting. More than likely most individuals do not forget their first visit to a museum, or the severe way that they are cautioned against touching the artworks or artifacts. Most people are taught that appropriate behavior inside a museum consists of folding their hands behind their back, and adopting a certain gait, while wordlessly appreciating whatever is presented on the white wall or in the glass case before them. However, rather than debate whether or not the Labor Museum was a museum by a contemporary definition, I will instead discuss what can be extrapolated from the Labor Museum exhibit for museums today. In particular, Addams’ belief that a museum be a place for dialogue and interactivity among

92 different groups of people supports the idea that a museum can, and in certain cases should, be central to the community where it resides.

THE FORGOTTEN GATEWAY EXHIBIT

In the spring of 2009, the Texas State History Museum opened an exhibit dedicated to immigration to the United States through Texas. The exhibit Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America Through Galveston Island was groundbreaking on a number of different fronts. Dr. Suzanne Seriff, a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin was its curator, and insisted that a bulk of the exhibit stem from contemporary stories of immigrants. Dr. Seriff’s thoughtful choice to create an exhibit about the history of immigration that included the voices of immigrants speaking proved to be a powerful and correct decision. In order to build the content of the exhibit, several significant factors had to be taken into consideration. While account after account of modern immigration stories poured into the electronic inbox of the museum’s content coordinator’s, news about the exhibit spread throughout the local immigrant and refugee population. The museum’s education department, including myself, took on the task of creating programs to help facilitate the kind of dialogue that was happening due to the intense and personal nature of the exhibit. Initially, it was very difficult to make contact with different groups that we thought we might partner with, but we did soon have success. In one collaboration prior to my employment at the museum, a local area school partnered with the museum, with the museum’s intention being that the residents of the neighborhood would include their own stories of immigration with the content of the immigration exhibit. Interestingly, the populations of the recent school were from two different culture groups, and were having difficulty creating community at the school, up to and including several instances of families fighting. Despite months of back and forth

93 communication, the two groups could not see eye to eye until a conversation about creating community cookbook took place. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk, and especially, share recipes and food ways. The birth of this school’s community was found in the shared experience of food, which opened the way for different groups in the community to share what was positive about them.12 The community cookbook and its social effects reminded me of the Labor Museum. One of the things that would have been true for the vast majority of visitors to Hull-House is that despite ethnic, cultural, or religious differences, most would have the experience of crossing the Atlantic as a common experience. When attempting to create a similar immersive environment at the museum, identifying the surrounding communities became a crucial step for staff. At the time of the opening of the Hull-House, art and art education was one of the unique cross-cultural experiences Addams and her contemporaries felt they could provide. After the cookbook project, the museum became involved in a new oral history project aimed at collecting contemporary stories of immigration from local residents. Because many of local residents knew about the cookbook project, they were not less hesitant to openly talk about their experiences emigrating to the United States, and the difficulties they encountered along the way. Of great significant to me was the day when a visitor remarked that she had never had a museum ask her for personal information to be used in an exhibit. She was surprised when she learned that the stories in the exhibit had been collected over a four- year period, and that the museum was still collecting stories about immigration as part of an ongoing program. Another unusual quality of the Forgotten Gateway exhibit was that it invited audience participation on yet another level. In each of the galleries, vinyl text asked

12 The cookbook project was created and project managed by Linda Ho-Peche, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

94 visitors to answer a question on a yellow sticky note, and leave it for others to consider. Adults and children alike thoughtfully answered questions such as “Have you ever been forced to move against your will, how did it make you feel?” “Yes, we used to live in California, and my parents did not ask me before we moved to Texas,” was a typical type of youth response, while one adult commented, “Yes, I was kidnapped and forced to come this country and work for no pay, and no one ever asked me that question before.” In the process of building the exhibit, members of the education team began to consider what was going to happen when the public came to the museum to take a tour.

Much like the Hull-House’s Labor Museum, Forgotten Gateway did not lend itself to an authoritative explanation of what was being viewed, but invited the viewer to instead learn by becoming a participant. After considering how best to further involve the public in the discussion of immigration, members of the development team decided that part of the interpretive programs for the exhibit would focus on hosting facilitated dialogues as opposed to standard docent lead tours. Much like the “kitchen table talk” of the Tenement Museum in New York City13, Gateway’s facilitated dialogue was intentioned to help visitors process what they were seeing, and what it made them think about historical and current issues in immigration. The following is a brief account that describes both the contents of Forgotten Gateway, and its effect on a modern immigrant to the United States and myself as we walked through the exhibit. Most importantly, it supports the idea that dialogue and communication may be fundamental to some individual’s preferences for a museum experience, and may come to the surface in surprising ways.

13 The Tenement Museum invites visitors to participate in a conversation about their experiences of the museum, including to sit down at a kitchen table to talk with each other after a tour.

95 A MODERN IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE

I waited near the information desk for the Congolese mother14 and her two daughters to arrive. I have invited her through a meeting with Refugee Services to come preview the Forgotten Gateway exhibit, and participate in an oral history project with me. Her name is Abeba, and this was her first time to visit the museum. It was raining terribly, and she was late. The lines were quite long, and I had almost given up hope; this would not be the first time that one of my refugee volunteers for the oral history project would not come. The door opened, and I saw Abeba arrive. I waved at her. This was the first time that we would meet face to face. I watched her face immediately began to tighten as she entered the museum door. It was a very busy day, and one line was backed up passed the entrance to the exhibit. Abeba’s representative from Refugee Services, Tina, is with her, as is her interpreter, Kankika. I motioned the group to follow me into the exhibit. I stopped at the entrance, and introduced myself. I explained that we would be going on a tour of the exhibit and I would show them a few things that I really found interesting, but that I hoped our tour would be more like a conversation. We passed a section titled “Dangers of the Journey,” and stopped to gaze at an image of a child from the early 1800’s being thrown overboard a sailing ship after succumbing to pneumonia. After a moment, Abeba gathered her own tiny children to her skirt, and bustled them away, to the next panel where an image of an American Indian in full pow wow regalia stood against a blue sky. She started speaking rapidly to Kankika, but I could not understand what she saying, it was not in English. I asked her what she found interesting about the panel. Abeba finally began to speak. “I am very interested in your native American refugees and how your country has treated them. I understand it also takes a very long time to leave your camps. It took my family many years before we could leave the camps

14 Names have been changed.

96 where we lived before we could come to this country.” The words between us, I felt shocked to understand what is so clear from her perspective as a third generation refugee camp survivor who has waited so many years to finally become an American citizen. It was and is difficult for me to imagine how hard it must have been to live inside a refugee camp for three generations. We passed quickly through the exhibit until we arrive at a section where the walls literally become closer together. Now it is apparent that we are entering a boat. Super graphics of immigrants pinned with their numbered health cards pressed into us like an endless gangplank. The hall ended at a large wooden box of drawers; one of the daughters immediately pulled open. Inside, horrific looking medical instruments laid inside. Abeba carefully looked at me from the corner of her eye. “In my camp, if someone got sick, it would be a huge delay, maybe ten more years, to emigrate here. No one ever got sick, you understand?” I understood and I nodded. Tina, the refugee representative also nodded. We approached the end of the exhibit gallery, and I told my group that the museum is interested in how different families come to live in the U.S. Abeba paused her stroking of the daughters’ heads. “Why do you have this exhibit?” She wanted to know. “It is very realistic and sad how the story has not changed. Many of the things I saw today were also things that my family had to endure to come here. And now, my daughters already only want to be western, they want to change their names and eat only hotdogs and forget their family story.” I told Abeba her that we hoped the exhibit would help people talk with each other about immigration, and how it affects everyone who lives in the United States. She pointed to the vinyl imprint on the wall. “I will do what the wall says and write down my story then, even though I can’t see why a museum would care about that.” Abeba sat down at a table and began to write. After a time, she asked for another paper to transcribe what she had written. “I want to make sure that my English is good enough,” she said.

97 Abeba took a long time, and a good deal of obvious pride and care in writing down her family’s history. It was clear to me at that point that Abeba had a vested interest in her story being at the museum. I asked if I could take her picture with her children for the project, and she nodded. The family posed, but would not smile. I tried to coax a smile out of Abeba and her daughters. Abeba stopped me. “We don’t smile for cameras because a photo is always official.” Finally the family was done with the project. I thanked them for participating, and walked them out the door.

PARTICIPATORY GALLERIES VS. PARTICIPATION IN MUSEUMS

In Jane Addams’ time, an ideal museum was thought of as providing opportunities for people to think, study, and learn. According to Science magazine (1891), unlike a library, an ideal museum would also be able to inspire its visitors through “materials, in the form of multifarious collections, and the ways and means for increasing them, and of exchanging them with other museums. While some of these will be put on exhibition, at least those that have been sufficiently examined and classified, the larger portion will be kept in storage for the use of its collaborators (p. 45). Science (1891) also purported to explain the true purpose of a museum, and what types of exhibits would be the best for people to experience.

The true museum is that which approaches nearest to the cardinal idea of the Grecian museum. Its aim is not to amuse, nor to instruct, but to afford that inspiration which shall enable the visitor to instruct others. The reverent devotee approaches such a museum with no selfish motive. He invokes his muse to in- spire in him sentiments that shall benefit his fellow-men…such a museum is based on a broader idea than the exhibition-museum, although its frequenters may be fewer. Scientific research, long-continued study, profound contemplation, and conference with the writings of others-these are the purposes of such a museum. (p. 45)

98 Since that time, there have been many ideas about what an ideal museum should look like. Specifically, in last twenty years, one popular museum trend has been to include gallery spaces and exhibits within museums that invite visitor interaction. The concept of creating spaces for interaction with visitors came about in American museums in response to an observation in the late seventies that people were not going to museums due to their lack of relevance in the average person’s life. According to Hodges, (1978) museums responded by changing their agenda and presentation style.

Despite the pressing need for substantive reform, museums, on the whole, have gone relatively unchallenged and unchanged for decades. This lethargy in the face of an expanding public interest in the work of museums has given rise to criticism of the traditional purposes and functions of these institutions from within the museum profession itself and from without. A result has been the fashioning of new museum facilities and programs throughout the nation. (p. 148)

One new concept that was born from museum’s need to re-interest the public was the concept of the museum that was focused on providing a variety of experiences previously not offered by any other type of institution. Often termed participatory galleries or interactive exhibits, children’s museums and science museums accurately emphasized this type of hands-on learning. The choice for audience participation can be an institutional dilemma, depending on the type of collection that is being exhibited. A museum that is deciding whether or not to invite audience interaction in its exhibits would do best to first define what an ideal interactive experience would look like as an institution, with regards to the types of objects and information that is available, while keeping in mind conservatory issues. Mariana Adams (2003) from the Institute for Learning Innovation in Maryland writes:

The term "interactive" is, on closer examination, a concept that can mean different things to different people in a variety of contexts. There is a range of interactive experiences in art museums, from docent tours using inquiry-based discussions, to activity stations where visitors physically manipulate materials and devices, to artist-commissioned works that invite the visitor not only to engage physically in

99 some way with the work but, sometimes, to become a co-creator. A critical first step in developing an inter-active space is to describe the various dimensions of what an interactive experience in a museum can be and to come to agreement within the institution about the character and purpose of interactive. (p. 50)

A newer trend is for other types of museums, including art museums, to participate in providing learning environments that may result in a dedicated space within the museum for touching, seeing, and doing. While it may be attractive to view an interactive type of museum situation as being primarily created for children, in fact such environments are also quite popular across the spectrum of learning, age and physical ability especially playing a part. According to Moreno (2003), “Museum educators and art curators across the country are creating an increasingly wider variety of interactive art experiences for visitors of all ages. And, from all appearances, visitors are responding positively and enthusiastically (p. 43).” Initially thought to promote family learning and multi-generational communication, interactive galleries may promote participation in museums, but the focus of a participatory gallery is on the learner’s experience, not on the museum itself. The trend towards inviting visitor participation in museum exhibits is support of the idea that people come to a museum to learn, and also to express what they already know. Falk (1999) summarizes the relationship between a museum and visitor in his article Museums as Institution for Personal Learning.

Thus, an investigation of museum learning must encompass a respect for what individuals bring to the museum in terms of prior knowledge, experience, and interest; an eye to focusing on what visitors actually see, do, say, and think about during their experience; and a sense of time that takes into account what happens subsequently in visitors' lives. If these criteria can be met, then evidence of learning could meaningfully be sought and could reasonably be expected to emerge. (p. 261)

Participatory galleries may prove to be important tools for museums as they seek to institutionally enhance collaborative learning in communities. As inspired by many

100 examples of museums with exciting current day practice for families, multigenerational learning in museums has been an important topic among museumologists for some time. According to Butler & Sussman (1989), “From a very early time, this public included families” (p. 141). In fact, when Charles Wilson Peale opened his museum in 1786 to provide both entertainment and learning, he encouraged the attendance by multigenerational groups, by charging children half-price (p. 142). However, the mere existence of interactive galleries and spaces do not guarantee that the relationship between the museum and its audience is participatory in nature.

In contrast to older historical concepts of participation in museums, Fig. 6.2 Main characters from the Pinky Show who ask us if Museums will love us back. and in the name of embracing a new variety of cultural and social experience that could abound in communities today, a successful museum model of communication will hopefully emphasize types of communication that flows in a variety of directions, especially as it reflects a concept of cultural exchange. In a model of cultural exchange, community ideas and insights, and personal backgrounds become paramount in the discussion about what makes up the important facts about the history of a community. It is desirable to have the museum’s authority challenged in terms of knowledge production. When a museum seeks after an individual community’s expression of personal experience as a major integrative force for visiting the museum to begin with, future programs by the museum will likely experience success.

In terms of the Hull-House Labor Museum, public participation happened in a wide variety of ways. The Labor Museum was both an interactive exhibit, and invited

101 participation from visitors, much in the way that the creators of the Pinky Show wish that more museums today would do. In a popular online video created by an online persona known as The Pinky Show (2008), Kim, a guest of the show discusses her views on museums after taking a tour around the world in a online interview. In her investigations of museums, Kim found that:

Museums are like factories where certain values are manufactured and then distributed to society. If you want to see who's making the decisions maybe you can request to meet the "Board of Trustees." Actually, at first I thought there must be some kind of law against having poor people on a museum's board of trustees, but then later I found out that actually there isn't any law like this, this is just they way they like to do it. Anyway... [reading] the board of trustees are the ones that tell "The Community" what is worth remembering and thinking about, and therefore, also what is worth forgetting and not worth thinking about. This is a big responsibility so they are very careful about what kind of people they hire to work for them, otherwise if the museum starts sending out the wrong kind of perspectives, this can lead to mayhem!15 (p. 1)

Despite or perhaps because of the tongue-in-cheek criticism of museums by popular public opinion as typified by the Pinky Show, museums will hopefully endeavor to continue to create opportunities for meaningful dialogue and exchange, with such tremendous outcomes as evidenced by the Labor Museum.

CONCLUSION

For the most part, Jane Addams has been written about from the perspectives of sociology, social work, recreation theory and practice, and American history, but there is much left to be learned about her life and her philosophy of art education. One of the most interesting points that Addams makes through the Hull-House, particularly through the Labor Museum, is that social problems are best addressed through both pragmatic as well as idealistic means, and that art education is one vehicle that causes this to become

15 http://pinkyshow.org/videos/we-love-museums-do-museums-love-us-back

102 possible. The Labor Museum specifically drew art education together with one of the most important issues of Addams’ generation, the improvement of labor conditions, especially for women and children. By showing that the artwork and craft already being created by immigrant visitors was a valuable asset to the community surrounding Hull- House, Addams was able to demonstrate that communities can use the artwork they create as a means to unite themselves. The example of Hull-House shows us that it is possible to utilize a social network that has been created through the art education of a community in order to achieve significant political gains in social justice. Art education continues to grapple with issues concerning school funding for the arts, reforming school art education programs, visual and material culture studies, and the notion that “educators and artists confront important social issues through their artistic endeavors” (Ulbricht, 2005 p. 6). As art educators, we should try to utilize everything that is at our disposal, including the history of important figures like Jane Addams, in the pursuit of a socially conscious and responsible art education. Jane Addams’ philosophy of social democracy through education, and the art education models presented at the Butler Art Gallery and the Labor Museum provide current-day art educators with historically important observations. Addams’ observations about the relationships between art and labor, especially as expressed through the history from 1889-1900 at Chicago’s Hull-House, provide a successful precedence for museums to incorporate multigenerational communication in key community building endeavors.

103 Appendix

TIMELINE OF IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES 1815-195016 1815: The first great wave of immigration begins, bringing 5 million immigrants between 1815 and 1860. 1818: Liverpool becomes the most-used port of departure for Irish and British

immigrants. 1819: The first federal legislation on immigration requires notation of passenger lists. 1820: The U.S. population is about 9.6 million. About 151,000 new immigrants arrive

in 1820 alone. 1825: Great Britain decrees that England is overpopulated and repeals laws

prohibiting emigration. The first group of Norwegian immigrants arrive. 1846-7: Crop failures in Europe. Mortgage foreclosures send tens of thousands of the

dispossessed to United States. 1846: Irish of all classes emigrate to the United States as a result of the potato

famine. 1848: German political refugees emigrate following the failure of a revolution. 1862: The Homestead Act encourages naturalization by granting citizens title to 160

acres. 1875: First limitations on immigration. Residency permits required of Asians. 1880: The U.S. population is 50,155,783. More than 5.2 million immigrants enter the

country between 1880 and 1890. 1882: Chinese exclusion law is established. Russian anti-Semitism prompts a sharp rise in Jewish emigration. 1890: New York is home to as many Germans as Hamburg, Germany. 1891: The Bureau of Immigration is established. Congress adds health qualifications

to immigration restrictions. 1892: Ellis Island replaces Castle Garden. 1894-6: To escape Moslem massacres, Armenian Christians emigrate. 1897: Pine-frame buildings on Ellis Island are burned to the ground in a disastrous

fire. 1900: The U.S. population is 75,994,575. More than 3,687,000 immigrants were admitted in the previous ten years. Ellis Island receiving station reopens with brick and ironwork structures. 1906: Bureau of Immigration is established. 1910: The Mexican Revolution sends thousands to the United States seeking

employment. 1914-8: World War I halts a period of mass migration to the United States. 1921: The first quantitative immigration law sets temporary annual quotas according

to Nationality. Immigration drops off. 1924: The National Origins Act establishes a discriminatory quota system. The Border

Patrol is established. 1940: The Alien Registration Act calls for registration and fingerprinting of all aliens.

Approximately 5 million aliens register. 1946: The War Brides Act facilitates the immigration of foreign-born wives, finances,

16 Reprinted from Ellis Island Records, Archives, information on the immigrants in the museum. http://www.ellisislandimmigrants.org/

104 husbands, and children of U.S. Armed Forces personnel. 1952: The Immigration and Naturalization Act brings into one comprehensive statute

the multiple laws that govern immigration and naturalization to date. 1954: Ellis Island closes, marking an end to mass immigration.

105

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